The bi-directional transfer between language and music experience: A study based on the tonal categorial perception of native Mandarin-speaking musicians

Subjects: Psychology >> Other Disciplines of Psychology submitted time 2024-06-02

Yang, Mingchuan Li, Xianzhuo Liang, Dandan

Abstract： The relations of music and language pitch processing have been extensively investigated during these years. Based on the similarity of resource invocation of language and music processing, researchers believe that language and music processing have a common neurophysiological basis and the experience of the two fields can be transferred to each other. The transfer effect of the domain-general acoustical experience of processing has been validated by a large number of studies. However, in addition to domain-general acoustic resources, language processing also involves phonological resources specific to the language domain, such as the categorical perception of tones. Researchers pointed out that experience in language and music can also transfer at the level of domain-specific competence, revealing the transfer of training effect. To date, whether this kind of transfer effect in terms of the categorical perception of tones happens remains unclear. Thus, the current study aimed to investigate the transfer of language and music experience in native Mandarin-speaking musicians in a bi-directional fashion./t/nThe present study used a 2 (group: musicians vs. non-musicians) × 2 (stimulus type: music vs. speech) between-and-within-subjects design. Sixty participants were involved in the current study, including thirty native Mandarin-speaking musicians and thirty native Mandarin-speaking non-musicians. The identification and discrimination tasks in the traditional categorical perception paradigm were adopted, in which the Mandarin T1-T2 tonal continuum from i ^˥ to i^˧˥ and its musical counterpart were constructed. The identification task required the participants to judge whether the stimulus in the continuum was T1 or T2, and the discrimination task asked participants to decide whether the two stimuli crossing two steps were the same or different./t/nSeen from the identification curve, musicians showed sharper and narrower categorical boundary compared to non-musicians. Both curves of musical stimuli and language stimuli yielded the typical pattern of categorical perception, i.e., the difference in identification rate between the two adjacent stimuli across the boundary was much larger than that between the two adjacent stimuli on both sides of the boundary. In the discrimination task, musicians showed enhanced within-category discrimination accuracy, between-category discrimination accuracy, and discrimination peakedness. Also, the discrimination accuracy of between-category stimuli units could be seen higher than that of within-category stimuli units, which could be interpreted as a typical pattern of categorical perception./t/nThe results showed that music experience could significantly enhance the phonological ability of native Chinese musicians, and their linguistic categorical perception pattern was transferred to musical perception. The conclusion could be drawn that there was a bi-directional transfer effect between the language and music experience of native Mandarin-speaking musicians on the categorical perception of tones, which provides empirical support for the “training transfer effect”. The “shared domain-general view” of language and music processing, i.e., language and music processing share a common neurophysiological basis, could also be validated in terms of the phonological processing ability specific to the language domain.

Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review

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