Musical Experience Facilitates Lexical Tone Processing Among Mandarin Speakers

The common acoustic properties between music and spoken language have aroused increasing attention in recent decades.As the perception of the fundamental frequency(F0),the pitch has always been the focus of researchers when studying the relationship between music and spoken language.There is a widespread perspective that musical experience may confer an advantage in intonation and tone processing.Although this cross-domain effects of musical experience on non-tonal language’s linguistic processing have been established for a long time,it remains unclear whether musical experience benefits the processing of lexical tones in a tonal language.The present study,using Event-related Potentials(ERPs),investigates the following questions: 1)How do Chinese native musicians process Mandarin Tone 1/3expressed in native-and foreign-accented speech? 2)To what extent the musical experience will ameliorate the processing of different Mandarin tones? To this end,this study selected Chinese native speakers with a high level of musical ability as experimental subjects.We focused on the EEG changes in response to four different types of accent-and-tone information(foreign-accented Tone 1,foreign-accented Tone 3,native-accented Tone 1,and native-accented Tone 3)in the context of Chinese sentences.The auditory materials were recorded by a native Chinese speaker and a native English speaker who speaks Chinese as a second language,e.g.,Feifei wanted to cut vegetables,and found a knife /dao1/;Feifei took a boat,and landed on the island /dao3/.To elucidate the effects of musical experience on tone processing,we compared the present study’s data of musicians with data of non-musicians from Li Qiqi’s(2019)study.Results show that for the musicians group: 1)Mandarin Tone 3 elicited greater phonological mismatch negativity(PMN)than tone1 did in both native-and foreign-accented conditions;2)Native-accented Tone 3 elicited a larger N400 effect than foreign-accented Tone 3,while no significant difference was observed between native-and foreign-accented Tone 1.Then,we compared the data of musicians and non-musicians,and found that: 1)musicians elicited greater negative effect in native-accented Tone 3,while non-musicians did that in foreign-accented Tone 3;2)the different processing of accented Tone 3 occurred later in musicians group(450-550 ms)than that in non-musicians group(50-150 ms).These findings indicate: 1)There is a processing difference between Mandarin Tone 3 and Tone 1,and the processing of Tone 3 is more complex than that of Tone 1;2)Although both groups of subjects had a good ability in Mandarin as native Chinese speakers,tonal language speakers with musical experience could clearly distinguish between tones with a foreign accent and those with a native accent.Taken together,the present study suggests that language users with musical experience perform better in distinguishing and processing tonal language even in the presence of foreign accent interference.It indicates that the advantage in musical ability can indeed be transferable into language processing to a certain extent.This paper provides scientific evidence and is instructive for further research on the interaction between music and spoken language.