A Behavioral Study In Linguistic And Musical Pitch Perception

The comparative study of music and language is drawing increasing amount of research interests. Music and speech are perceptually distinct but share many commonalities at both acoustic and cognitive level. Advanced auditory skills of musicians, which are acquired through years of training, may percolate to other domains such as speech, language, emotion and auditory processing. A growing body of literature focuses on how music experience affects linguistic perception and vice-versa.In contrast, previous studies have also documented the dissociation between music and language processing. Researchers suggested the paradox may be resolved from a more systematic investigation into the cognitive components involved in both domains. Pitch is a fundamental acoustic and cognitive component in music and language. Both musical and linguistic pitches are measured by frequency(tone in language is equivalent to pitch in music). Fine-grained pitch processing has proven particularly valuable in dissecting the differences between how the brain handles speech and music [41]. While some researches argued for overlapping pitch processing in music and language, others indicated different neural bases. According to the Whorfian Hypothesis it is predicted that exposure to tonal language could affect the way our brain handles musical pitch.Using behavioral methods, this study investigated whether lexical pitch processing could be associated with perception of music pitch. In the present study, monolingual English speakers were exposed to a tonal language in which differences in pitch correspond to differences in word meaning. They also participated in the musical pitch discrimination task prior to and after the word training program. Participants showed behavioral improvement in musical pitch discrimination following lexical tone training.Additionally, participants’ scores in tonal word identification were associated with their performance in musical pitch discrimination. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between scores in tone identification and musical pitch discrimination. This study will further our understanding of Whorfian Hypothesis. It will also help us to address whether language and music share a common set of processes(domain specific vs. domain general).