Music-melody Perception in Tone-language and Non- Tone-language Speakers

Speech and music both utilize pitch variation to convey meaning, such as emotional affect. In speech, pitch conveys pragmatic meaning and, in tone languages, lexical information. This study examines how experience processing lexical pitch affects music-pitch perception. Twenty-eight non-musicians (14 English and 14 Mandarin speakers) discriminated and identified short melodies. The Mandarin listeners more accurately discriminated the melodies than the English listeners (MannWhitney U=140.5, p<0.05; 2-tailed t(21.86)=2.45, p<0.05, d= 0.93), but the English listeners more accurately matched the melodies with graphical representations of the pitch changes than the Mandarin listeners (MannWhitney U=26.5, p<0.005; two-tailed t(25.44)= -3.94, p<0.001, d=1.15). Experience with lexical-pitch processing may therefore enhance attention to, and facilitate discrimination of, rapidly-changing pitches. But, learned linguistic pitch-pattern categories may interfere with, and impair identification of, novel music-pitch patterns. Results are discussed with respect to a cognitive-processing framework involving the influence of experientially-acquired pitchcategory knowledge upon novel-pitch input. Format: Poster presentation