Hutka Stefanie, Bidelman Gavin M, Moreno Sylvain
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3G3; Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, 3560 Bathurst Street, Toronto, ON, Canada M6A 2E1.
Institute for Intelligent Systems, University of Memphis, 365 Innovation Drive., Memphis, TN 38152, USA; School of Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Memphis, 807 Jefferson Ave., Memphis, TN 38105, USA.
Neuropsychologia. 2015 May;71:52-63. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.03.019. Epub 2015 Mar 19.
Psychophysiological evidence supports a music-language association, such that experience in one domain can impact processing required in the other domain. We investigated the bidirectionality of this association by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) in native English-speaking musicians, native tone language (Cantonese) nonmusicians, and native English-speaking nonmusician controls. We tested the degree to which pitch expertise stemming from musicianship or tone language experience similarly enhances the neural encoding of auditory information necessary for speech and music processing. Early cortical discriminatory processing for music and speech sounds was characterized using the mismatch negativity (MMN). Stimuli included 'large deviant' and 'small deviant' pairs of sounds that differed minimally in pitch (fundamental frequency, F0; contrastive musical tones) or timbre (first formant, F1; contrastive speech vowels). Behavioural F0 and F1 difference limen tasks probed listeners' perceptual acuity for these same acoustic features. Musicians and Cantonese speakers performed comparably in pitch discrimination; only musicians showed an additional advantage on timbre discrimination performance and an enhanced MMN responses to both music and speech. Cantonese language experience was not associated with enhancements on neural measures, despite enhanced behavioural pitch acuity. These data suggest that while both musicianship and tone language experience enhance some aspects of auditory acuity (behavioural pitch discrimination), musicianship confers farther-reaching enhancements to auditory function, tuning both pitch and timbre-related brain processes.
心理生理学证据支持音乐与语言之间的关联，即一个领域的经验会影响另一个领域所需的加工过程。我们通过测量以英语为母语的音乐家、以声调语言（粤语）为母语的非音乐家以及以英语为母语的非音乐家对照组的事件相关电位（ERP），来研究这种关联的双向性。我们测试了源于音乐才能或声调语言经验的音高专业知识在多大程度上同样增强了语音和音乐加工所需的听觉信息的神经编码。使用失配负波（MMN）来表征对音乐和语音声音的早期皮层辨别加工。刺激包括在音高（基频，F0；对比性音乐音调）或音色（第一共振峰，F1；对比性语音元音）上差异极小的“大偏差”和“小偏差”声音对。行为F0和F1差异阈限任务探究了听众对这些相同声学特征的感知敏锐度。音乐家和说粤语的人在音高辨别方面表现相当；只有音乐家在音色辨别表现上有额外优势，并且对音乐和语音都有增强的MMN反应。尽管行为上的音高敏锐度有所提高，但粤语语言经验与神经测量指标的增强无关。这些数据表明，虽然音乐才能和声调语言经验都增强了听觉敏锐度的某些方面（行为上的音高辨别），但音乐才能赋予听觉功能更广泛的增强，调整了与音高和音色相关的大脑过程。
