title: Effect of musical experience on learning lexical tone categories.
abstract: Previous studies suggest that musicians show an advantage in processing and encoding foreign-language lexical tones. The current experiments examined whether musical experience influences the perceptual learning of lexical tone categories. Experiment I examined whether musicians with no prior experience of tonal languages differed from nonmusicians in the perception of a lexical tone continuum. Experiment II examined whether short-term perceptual training on lexical tones altered the perception of the lexical tone continuum differentially in English-speaking musicians and nonmusicians. Results suggested that (a) musicians exhibited higher sensitivity overall to tonal changes, but perceived the lexical tone continuum in a manner similar to nonmusicians (continuously), in contrast to native Mandarin speakers (categorically); and (b) short-term perceptual training altered perception; however, there were no significant differences between the effects of training on musicians and nonmusicians.
authors: Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195.
authors: T Christina
authors: TC
authors: Zhao
authors: Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195.
authors: Patricia K
authors: PK
authors: Kuhl
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D009146:Music; D010700:Phonetics; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D014833:Voice Quality; D055815:Young Adult