School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Earley Gate, Reading RG6 6AL, United Kingdom.
Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages and Brain and Mind Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2020 Dec;148(6):3443. doi: 10.1121/10.0002776.
Many studies have reported a musical advantage in perceiving lexical tones among non-native listeners, but it is unclear whether this advantage also applies to native listeners, who are likely to show ceiling-like performance and thus mask any potential musical advantage. The ongoing tone merging phenomenon in Hong Kong Cantonese provides a unique opportunity to investigate this as merging tone pairs are reported to be difficult to differentiate even among native listeners. In the present study, native Cantonese musicians and non-musicians were compared based on discrimination and identification of merging Cantonese tone pairs to determine whether a musical advantage in perception will be observed, and if so, whether this is seen on the phonetic and/or phonological level. The tonal space of the subjects' lexical tone production was also compared. Results indicated that the musicians outperformed the non-musicians on the two perceptual tasks, as indexed by a higher accuracy and faster reaction time, particularly on the most difficult tone pair. In the production task, however, there was no group difference in various indices of tonal space. Taken together, musical experience appears to facilitate native listeners' perception, but not production, of lexical tones, which partially supports a music-to-language transfer effect.
许多研究报告称，非母语者在感知词汇声调方面具有音乐优势，但母语者是否也具有这种优势尚不清楚，因为母语者的表现可能接近上限，从而掩盖了任何潜在的音乐优势。香港粤语中正在进行的调合现象为我们提供了一个独特的研究机会，因为即使是母语者也很难区分调合的声调对。在本研究中，我们比较了以粤语为母语的音乐家和非音乐家在区分和识别调合的粤语声调对方面的表现，以确定是否会观察到感知方面的音乐优势，如果有，这种优势是在语音还是音系层面上表现出来的。同时还比较了受试者在产生词汇声调时的音高空间。结果表明，音乐家在两个感知任务中的表现优于非音乐家，表现在准确性更高和反应时间更快，特别是在最难的声调对上。然而，在产生任务中，两组在音高空间的各种指标上没有差异。总的来说，音乐经验似乎有助于母语者感知词汇声调，但对词汇声调的产生没有帮助，这部分支持了音乐到语言的迁移效应。
