Effects of linguistic background and musical experience on melodic pitch and linguistic pitch processing

Abstract

The current study examined effects of tone-language background and musicality as well as their interaction in four melodic and linguistic pitch processing tasks, including simple pitch discrimination, pitch memory, pitch interval discrimination and Thai tone identification tasks. Participants with tone-language and non-tonal language background, and with and without long term musical training, i.e. Cantonese musicians (CM), Cantonese non-musicians (CNM), English musicians (EM) and English non-musicians (ENM), were included. Tone-language background and musical experience were found contributing to pitch processing. Results showed that musicians performed better in pitch memory, pitch interval discrimination and Thai tone identification task. Whereas advantages of language background varied with the nature of tasks. In cognitively related pitch memory task, CNM group was found having significantly better memory of the middle probes than ENM. In more musically related pitch interval discrimination task, CM outperformed EM, whereas CNM and ENM groups did not differ significantly. In more linguistically related Thai tone identification task, Cantonese group overall significantly outperformed English group. The findings illustrated imbalance transfer effect from music-to-language and language-to-music. Moreover, the relationship between tone-language background and musical experience is neither straightforward, nor synergetic, but rather of compensatory, conditional and non-additive relationships.