Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages, Leung Kau Kui Building, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2012 Oct;132(4):2711-20. doi: 10.1121/1.4747010.
This study investigates the relationship between music and speech, testing whether musical training has any facilitatory effects on native tone language speakers. Some Cantonese tone pairs are merging in recent years. The merging subjects have poorer general lexical tone perception than the control subjects. Previous studies showed that musical training facilitates lexical tone perception of nontone language speakers, but it is unclear if the same is true for tone language speakers. Three groups of listeners (standard Cantonese, merging Cantonese, nontone) with and without musical training participated in AX discrimination tasks of Cantonese monosyllables and pure tones resynthesized from Cantonese lexical tones. Results show that while musical training enhances lexical tone perception of nontone listeners, it has little influence on Cantonese listeners. The findings suggest that the linguistic use of tones is more fundamental and more robust than musical tones. Our results are compatible with the idea that linguistic and musical mechanisms belong to separate but overlapping domains.
这项研究调查了音乐和语言的关系，测试音乐训练是否对母语为声调语言的人有促进作用。近年来，一些粤语声调对正在合并。与对照组相比，合并组的受试者在一般声调感知方面较差。先前的研究表明，音乐训练有助于非声调语言使用者的声调感知，但对于声调语言使用者是否也是如此还不清楚。三组（标准粤语、合并粤语、非声调）有无音乐训练的听众参与了粤语单音节和从粤语词汇声调重新合成的纯音的 AX 辨别任务。结果表明，音乐训练虽然提高了非声调听众的声调感知能力，但对粤语听众的影响较小。这些发现表明，声调的语言使用比音乐声调更为基础和稳健。我们的结果与语言和音乐机制属于不同但重叠的领域的观点一致。
