Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, 3401-C Walnut Street, Suite 300, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2019 Dec;146(6):4086. doi: 10.1121/1.5134442.
Pitch perception involves the processing of multidimensional acoustic cues, and listeners can exhibit different cue integration strategies in interpreting pitch. This study aims to examine whether musicality and language experience have effects on listeners' pitch perception strategies. Both Mandarin and English listeners were recruited to participate in two experiments: (1) a pitch classification experiment that tested their relative reliance on f0 and spectral cues, and (2) the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Musical Abilities that objectively quantified their musical aptitude as continuous musicality scores. Overall, the results show a strong musicality effect: Listeners with higher musicality scores relied more on f0 in pitch perception, while listeners with lower musicality scores were more likely to attend to spectral cues. However, there were no effects of language experience on musicality scores or cue integration strategies in pitch perception. These results suggest that less musical or even amusic subjects may not suffer impairment in linguistic pitch processing due to the multidimensional nature of pitch cues.
音高感知涉及多维声学线索的处理，而听众在解释音高时可以表现出不同的线索整合策略。本研究旨在探讨音乐能力和语言经验是否会影响听众的音高感知策略。本研究招募了汉语和英语听众参与两个实验：（1）音高分类实验，测试他们对基频和频谱线索的相对依赖程度；（2）蒙特利尔音乐能力评估测试，客观量化他们的音乐能力，作为连续音乐能力分数。总的来说，结果显示出强烈的音乐能力效应：音乐能力得分较高的听众在音高感知中更依赖基频，而音乐能力得分较低的听众更倾向于关注频谱线索。然而，语言经验对音乐能力得分或音高感知中的线索整合策略没有影响。这些结果表明，由于音高线索的多维性质，音乐能力较低甚至完全没有音乐能力的受试者在语言音高处理方面可能不会受到损害。
