Pfordresher Peter Q, Brown Steven
Department of Psychology, 355 Park Hall, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, New York 14260, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2009 Aug;71(6):1385-98. doi: 10.3758/APP.71.6.1385.
Individuals differ markedly with respect to how well they can imitate pitch through singing and in their ability to perceive pitch differences. We explored whether the use of pitch in one's native language can account for some of the differences in these abilities. Results from two studies suggest that individuals whose native language is a tone language, in which pitch contributes to word meaning, are better able to imitate (through singing) and perceptually discriminate musical pitch. These findings support the view that language acquisition fine-tunes the processing of critical auditory dimensions in the speech signal and that this fine-tuning can be carried over into nonlinguistic domains.
个体在通过唱歌模仿音高的能力以及感知音高差异的能力方面存在显著差异。我们探究了母语中音调的使用是否能够解释这些能力上的部分差异。两项研究的结果表明，母语为声调语言（即音调对词义有贡献）的个体，在通过唱歌模仿和感知辨别音乐音高方面表现得更好。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即语言习得对语音信号中关键听觉维度的处理进行了微调，并且这种微调可以延伸到非语言领域。
