The effect of Mandarin listeners' musical and pitch aptitude on perceptual learning of Cantonese level-tones

Contrary to studies on speech learning of consonants and vowels, the issue individual variability is less well understood in lexical tones. Whereas existing have focused contour-tone (Mandarin) by listeners without experience a tonal language, this study addressed research gap investigating perceptual level-tone contrasts (Cantonese) learners with system (Mandarin). Critically, we sought answer question how Mandarin listeners' initial perception Cantonese level-tones are affected their musical pitch aptitude. Mandarin-speaking participants completed pretest, training, posttest discrimination identification (ID) tasks. They were assessed aptitude nonspeech thresholds before training. The results revealed significant training effect ID task but not task. Importantly, regression analyses showed an advantage higher perceiving categories. explained part speakers system. finding implies that prior language does necessarily override