TY - JOUR
T1 - Musical experience modulates categorical perception of lexical tones in native Chinese speakers
AU - Wu, Han
AU - Ma, Xiaohui
AU - Zhang, Linjun
AU - Liu, Youyi
AU - Zhang, Yang
AU - Shu, Hua
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Wu, Ma, Zhang, Liu, Zhang and Shu.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - Although musical training has been shown to facilitate both native and non-native phonetic perception, it remains unclear whether and how musical experience affects native speakers' categorical perception (CP) of speech at the suprasegmental level. Using both identification and discrimination tasks, this study compared Chinese-speaking musicians and non-musicians in their CP of a lexical tone continuum (from the high level tone, Tone1 to the high falling tone, Tone4). While the identification functions showed similar steepness and boundary location between the two subject groups, the discrimination results revealed superior performance in the musicians for discriminating within-category stimuli pairs but not for between-category stimuli. These findings suggest that musical training can enhance sensitivity to subtle pitch differences between within-category sounds in the presence of robust mental representations in service of CP of lexical tonal contrasts.
AB - Although musical training has been shown to facilitate both native and non-native phonetic perception, it remains unclear whether and how musical experience affects native speakers' categorical perception (CP) of speech at the suprasegmental level. Using both identification and discrimination tasks, this study compared Chinese-speaking musicians and non-musicians in their CP of a lexical tone continuum (from the high level tone, Tone1 to the high falling tone, Tone4). While the identification functions showed similar steepness and boundary location between the two subject groups, the discrimination results revealed superior performance in the musicians for discriminating within-category stimuli pairs but not for between-category stimuli. These findings suggest that musical training can enhance sensitivity to subtle pitch differences between within-category sounds in the presence of robust mental representations in service of CP of lexical tonal contrasts.
KW - Between-category discrimination
KW - Categorical perception
KW - Chinese lexical tone
KW - Musical training
KW - Within-category discrimination
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U2 - 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00436
DO - 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00436
M3 - Article
C2 - 25918511
AN - SCOPUS:84930643501
SN - 1664-1078
VL - 6
JO - Frontiers in Psychology
JF - Frontiers in Psychology
IS - APR
M1 - 436
ER -