Journal
PSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC
Volume 43, Issue 6, Pages 881-897Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0305735614546359
Keywords
absolute pitch; discrimination; musician; perception; tone language
Funding
- ARC Discovery grant [DP0988201]
- ARC Large grants [A00001283, A79601993]
- Australian Research Council [DP0988201] Funding Source: Australian Research Council
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The relationship between processing of speech and music was explored here via the linguistic vehicle of lexical tone. People with amusia have been found to be impaired on linguistic tasks; we examined whether absolute pitch (AP) possessors have an advantage on linguistic tasks. Participants were 3 groups of monolingual Australian-English speakers: non-AP musicians (musically-trained individuals who did not possess AP), AP musicians (musically-trained individuals who were AP possessors), and non-musicians (no musical training). Perceptual discrimination was tested in an AX same-different task for lexical tones presented in three contexts: normal Thai speech, low-pass filtered speech tones, and violin, with processing level manipulated via variation of the interstimulus interval (ISI). Non-musicians showed attenuated pitch discrimination of tones in speech, suggesting speech specialisation. On the other hand, all musicians showed greater accuracy, faster reaction times and less variation in accuracy across stimulus types than non-musicians. Importantly, AP musicians showed greater accuracy than non-AP musicians in the speech context, implying a domain-general advantage due to AP. However, speech-violin accuracy correlations for AP musicians were almost zero at the longer ISI, suggesting less commonality of mechanisms during more extensive processing. Results are discussed in terms of the role of AP in tone language perception.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available