Cooper Angela, Wang Yue, Ashley Richard
Northwestern University, USA.
Simon Fraser University, Canada.
Lang Speech. 2017 Mar;60(1):65-84. doi: 10.1177/0023830916642489. Epub 2016 Aug 3.
Musical experience has been demonstrated to play a significant role in the perception of non-native speech contrasts. The present study examined whether or not musical experience facilitated the normalization of speaking rate in the perception of non-native phonemic vowel length contrasts. Native English musicians and non-musicians (as well as native Thai control listeners) completed identification and AX (same-different) discrimination tasks with Thai vowels contrasting in phonemic length at three speaking rates. Results revealed facilitative effects of musical experience in the perception of Thai vowel length categories. Specifically, the English musicians patterned similarly to the native Thai listeners, demonstrating higher accuracy at identifying and discriminating between-category vowel length distinctions than at discriminating within-category durational differences due to speaking rate variations. The English musicians also outperformed non-musicians at between-category vowel length discriminations across speaking rates, indicating musicians' superiority in perceiving categorical phonemic length differences. These results suggest that musicians' attunement to rhythmic and temporal information in music transferred to facilitating their ability to normalize contextual quantitative variations (due to speaking rate) and perceive non-native temporal phonemic contrasts.
音乐经验已被证明在非母语语音对比的感知中起着重要作用。本研究考察了音乐经验是否有助于在非母语音素元音长度对比的感知中使语速正常化。以英语为母语的音乐家和非音乐家（以及以泰语为母语的对照听众）完成了识别任务和AX（相同-不同）辨别任务，所使用的泰语元音在三种语速下音素长度形成对比。结果显示了音乐经验在泰语元音长度类别的感知中具有促进作用。具体而言，以英语为母语的音乐家的表现与以泰语为母语的听众相似，在识别和辨别类别间元音长度差异方面比辨别因语速变化导致的类别内时长差异具有更高的准确性。在不同语速下的类别间元音长度辨别中，以英语为母语的音乐家也比非音乐家表现更优，表明音乐家在感知类别性音素长度差异方面具有优势。这些结果表明，音乐家对音乐中节奏和时间信息的敏感度转移到了促进他们使上下文定量变化（因语速所致）正常化以及感知非母语时间音素对比的能力上。
