Jaisin Kankamol, Suphanchaimat Rapeepong, Figueroa Candia Mauricio A, Warren Jason D
Dementia Research Centre, UCL Institute of Neurology, University College LondonLondon, UK; Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Thammasat UniversityBangkok, Thailand.
Department of Global Health and Development, London School of Hygiene and Tropical MedicineLondon, UK; International Health Policy Program, Ministry of Public HealthBangkok, Thailand.
Front Psychol. 2016 May 9;7:662. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00662. eCollection 2016.
The speech-to-song illusion has attracted interest as a probe of the perceptual interface between language and music. One might anticipate differential speech-to-song effects in tonal vs. non-tonal languages, since these language classes differ importantly in the linguistic value they assign to tones. Here we addressed this issue for the first time in a cohort of 20 healthy younger adults whose native language was either tonal (Thai, Mandarin) or non-tonal (German, Italian) and all of whom were also fluent in English. All participants were assessed using a protocol designed to induce the speech-to-song illusion on speech excerpts presented in each of the five study languages. Over the combined participant group, there was evidence of a speech-to-song illusion effect for all language stimuli and the extent to which individual participants rated stimuli as "song-like" at baseline was significantly positively correlated with the strength of the speech-to-song effect. However, tonal and non-tonal language stimuli elicited comparable speech-to-song effects and no acoustic language parameter was found to predict the effect. Examining the effect of the listener's native language, tonal language native speakers experienced significantly weaker speech-to-song effects than non-tonal native speakers across languages. Both non-tonal native language and inability to understand the stimulus language significantly predicted the speech-to-song illusion. These findings together suggest that relative propensity to perceive prosodic structures as inherently linguistic vs. musical may modulate the speech-to-song illusion.
言语-歌曲错觉作为语言与音乐感知界面的一种探测手段，已引起了人们的兴趣。由于声调语言和非声调语言在赋予声调的语言价值上存在重要差异，人们可能会预期这两类语言在言语-歌曲效应上存在差异。在此，我们首次针对20名以声调语言（泰语、汉语普通话）或非声调语言（德语、意大利语）为母语且均精通英语的健康年轻成年人进行了研究，以探讨这一问题。所有参与者都使用了一种方案进行评估，该方案旨在对五种研究语言中每种语言呈现的言语摘录诱发言语-歌曲错觉。在整个参与者群体中，所有语言刺激都存在言语-歌曲错觉效应的证据，并且个体参与者在基线时将刺激评为“像歌曲”的程度与言语-歌曲效应的强度显著正相关。然而，声调语言和非声调语言刺激引发了相当的言语-歌曲效应，且未发现声学语言参数可预测该效应。在考察听众母语的影响时，声调语言母语者在所有语言中经历的言语-歌曲效应均显著弱于非声调语言母语者。非声调母语和无法理解刺激语言均显著预测了言语-歌曲错觉。这些发现共同表明，将韵律结构视为固有语言或音乐的相对倾向可能会调节言语-歌曲错觉。
