Categorical Perception of Lexical Tones and Stops in Mandarin-Speaking Musicians and Nonmusicians

This study investigates the perception of Mandarin lexical tones and stops to examine the degree of overlap between music and language. Eighteen musicians and 21 nonmusicians participated in a typical categorical perception task. Results showed that musicians and nonmusicians had comparable degree of categorical perception of tones and stops. Compared to nonmusicians, musicians exhibited enhanced sensitivities to within-category lexical tone stimuli. However, this improved ability was not observed in the perception of stops. These findings imply that musical experience strengthens the acuity of subtle low-level acoustic variations between within-category lexical tone stimuli without interfering with the high-level phonological representations of lexical tones, and this facilitatory effect is selective and could not readily extend to stop consonants in native language.

• Publication year

  2024

• Venue

  SAGE Open

• Publication date

  2024-01-01

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1177/21582440241227703
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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