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Music Does Not Facilitate Lexical Tone Normalization: A Speech-Specific Perceptual Process

Listeners utilize the immediate contexts to efficiently normalize variable vocal streams into standard phonology units. However, researchers debated whether non-speech contexts can also serve as valid clues for speech normalization. Supporters of the two sides proposed a general-auditory hypothesis...

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Autores principales: Tao, Ran, Zhang, Kaile, Peng, Gang
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8585521/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34777097
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717110
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author Tao, Ran
Zhang, Kaile
Peng, Gang
author_facet Tao, Ran
Zhang, Kaile
Peng, Gang
author_sort Tao, Ran
collection PubMed
description Listeners utilize the immediate contexts to efficiently normalize variable vocal streams into standard phonology units. However, researchers debated whether non-speech contexts can also serve as valid clues for speech normalization. Supporters of the two sides proposed a general-auditory hypothesis and a speech-specific hypothesis to explain the underlying mechanisms. A possible confounding factor of this inconsistency is the listeners’ perceptual familiarity of the contexts, as the non-speech contexts were perceptually unfamiliar to listeners. In this study, we examined this confounding factor by recruiting a group of native Cantonese speakers with sufficient musical training experience and a control group with minimal musical training. Participants performed lexical tone judgment tasks in three contextual conditions, i.e., speech, non-speech, and music context conditions. Both groups were familiar with the speech context and not familiar with the non-speech context. The musician group was more familiar with the music context than the non-musician group. The results evidenced the lexical tone normalization process in speech context but not non-speech nor music contexts. More importantly, musicians did not outperform non-musicians on any contextual conditions even if the musicians were experienced at pitch perception, indicating that there is no noticeable transfer in pitch perception from the music domain to the linguistic domain for tonal language speakers. The findings showed that even high familiarity with a non-linguistic context cannot elicit an effective lexical tone normalization process, supporting the speech-specific basis of the perceptual normalization process.
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spelling pubmed-85855212021-11-12 Music Does Not Facilitate Lexical Tone Normalization: A Speech-Specific Perceptual Process Tao, Ran Zhang, Kaile Peng, Gang Front Psychol Psychology Listeners utilize the immediate contexts to efficiently normalize variable vocal streams into standard phonology units. However, researchers debated whether non-speech contexts can also serve as valid clues for speech normalization. Supporters of the two sides proposed a general-auditory hypothesis and a speech-specific hypothesis to explain the underlying mechanisms. A possible confounding factor of this inconsistency is the listeners’ perceptual familiarity of the contexts, as the non-speech contexts were perceptually unfamiliar to listeners. In this study, we examined this confounding factor by recruiting a group of native Cantonese speakers with sufficient musical training experience and a control group with minimal musical training. Participants performed lexical tone judgment tasks in three contextual conditions, i.e., speech, non-speech, and music context conditions. Both groups were familiar with the speech context and not familiar with the non-speech context. The musician group was more familiar with the music context than the non-musician group. The results evidenced the lexical tone normalization process in speech context but not non-speech nor music contexts. More importantly, musicians did not outperform non-musicians on any contextual conditions even if the musicians were experienced at pitch perception, indicating that there is no noticeable transfer in pitch perception from the music domain to the linguistic domain for tonal language speakers. The findings showed that even high familiarity with a non-linguistic context cannot elicit an effective lexical tone normalization process, supporting the speech-specific basis of the perceptual normalization process. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-10-22 /pmc/articles/PMC8585521/ /pubmed/34777097 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717110 Text en Copyright © 2021 Tao, Zhang and Peng. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Tao, Ran
Zhang, Kaile
Peng, Gang
Music Does Not Facilitate Lexical Tone Normalization: A Speech-Specific Perceptual Process
title Music Does Not Facilitate Lexical Tone Normalization: A Speech-Specific Perceptual Process
title_full Music Does Not Facilitate Lexical Tone Normalization: A Speech-Specific Perceptual Process
title_fullStr Music Does Not Facilitate Lexical Tone Normalization: A Speech-Specific Perceptual Process
title_full_unstemmed Music Does Not Facilitate Lexical Tone Normalization: A Speech-Specific Perceptual Process
title_short Music Does Not Facilitate Lexical Tone Normalization: A Speech-Specific Perceptual Process
title_sort music does not facilitate lexical tone normalization: a speech-specific perceptual process
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8585521/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34777097
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717110
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