Processing Linguistic and Musical Pitch by English-Speaking Musicians and Non-Musicians

The perception of music and speech both involve processing complex acoustic stimuli. It remains unclear, however, whether the same or distinct mechanisms are implicated in music and speech perception. Previous research suggested that musical training may facilitate linguistic pitch perception. (Alexander, Wong, and Bradlow, 2005) Deutsch et al (2006) reported higher proportion of absolute pitch possessors in tone language (mandarin) speakers. This study explored the relationship between musical and linguistic pitch processing in four experiments. Two groups of participants were involved, musicians and non-musicians, all participants are native American English-speakers. The results show that despite limited exposure to the Mandarin tones, the musicians identified the intact Mandarin tones at 68% correct, outperforming non-musicians with 44% correct. The results also show that despite limited amount of pitch information in the stimuli, tone identification accuracy reached 54% for musicians and 36% for non-musicians in the silent-center condition; and 31% correct for musicians and 28% correct for non-musicians in the onset-only condition. While these results appear to suggest that musical training might facilitate linguistic pitch processing, no significant correlation was found in the identification accuracy between musical tones and Mandarin tones, weakening the argument that musical and linguistic pitch processing are closely associated.