Ao Chen

Cross-domain correlation in pitch perception, the influence of native language

ABSTRACT The current study explores how language experience may shape the correlation between lexical tone and musical pitch perception. A two domains (music and lexical tone) by two languages (tone, Mandarin Chinese and non-tone, Dutch) design is adopted. Participants were tested on their discrimination of Mandarin Chinese lexical tones, Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), and Musical Ear Test (MET). The Chinese listeners outperformed the Dutch listeners on both MBEA and MET, but had comparable accuracies for the lexical tone discrimination. Importantly, a significant cross-domain correlation was only observed for the Dutch listeners but not for the Chinese listeners. For tone language listeners, once lexical tones have been acquired, native listeners perceive them as phonological categories, and split them from other pitch variations that do not play a phonemic role. Non-tone language listeners, on the other hand, perceive both lexical tones and musical pitch on a psycho-acoustical basis, hence exhibit a unified perception of pitch across the two domains.

Pitch Perception in the First Year of Life, a Comparison of Lexical Tones and Musical Pitch

Pitch variation is pervasive in speech, regardless of the language to which infants are exposed. Lexical tone is influenced by general sensitivity to pitch. We examined whether the development in lexical tone perception may develop in parallel with perception of pitch in other cognitive domains namely music. Using a visual fixation paradigm, 100 and one 4- and 12-month-old Dutch infants were tested on their discrimination of Chinese rising and dipping lexical tones as well as comparable three-note musical pitch contours. The 4-month-old infants failed to show a discrimination effect in either condition, whereas the 12-month-old infants succeeded in both conditions. These results suggest that lexical tone perception may reflect and relate to general pitch perception abilities, which may serve as a basis for developing more complex language and musical skills.

Auditory ERP response to successive stimuli in infancy

Background. Auditory Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) are useful for understanding early auditory development among infants, as it allows the collection of a relatively large amount of data in a short time. So far, studies that have investigated development in auditory ERPs in infancy have mainly used single sounds as stimuli. Yet in real life, infants must decode successive rather than single acoustic events. In the present study, we tested 4-, 8-, and 12-month-old infants’ auditory ERPs to musical melodies comprising three piano notes, and examined ERPs to each individual note in the melody. Methods. Infants were presented with 360 repetitions of a three-note melody while EEG was recorded from 128 channels on the scalp through a Geodesic Sensor Net. For each infant, both latency and amplitude of auditory components P1 and N2 were measured from averaged ERPs for each individual note. Results. Analysis was restricted to response collected at frontal central site. For all three notes, there was an overall reduction in latency for both P1 and N2 over age. For P1, latency reduction was significant from 4 to 8 months, but not from 8 to 12 months. N2 latency, on the other hand, decreased significantly from 4 to 8 to 12 months. With regard to amplitude, no significant change was found for either P1 or N2. Nevertheless, the waveforms of the three age groups were qualitatively different: for the 4-month-olds, the P1–N2 deflection was attenuated for the second and the third notes; for the 8-month-olds, such attenuation was observed only for the middle note; for the 12-month-olds, the P1 and N2 peaks show relatively equivalent amplitude and peak width across all three notes. Conclusion. Our findings indicate that the infant brain is able to register successive acoustic events in a stream, and ERPs become better time-locked to each composite event over age. Younger infants may have difficulties in responding to late occurring events in a stream, and the onset response to the late events may overlap with the incomplete response to preceding events.

Influence of pitch dimensions on non-native tone perception by Dutch and Mandarin listeners

Previous studies have shown that listeners of different language backgrounds attend to different pitch dimensions when perceiving non-native tones by acoustic approaches. The present study investigated which dimensions of pitch, namely, pitch contour, pitch level, together with the position where it occurs in a word, influenced non-native tone perception by tone language (Mandarin) and non-tone language (Dutch) listeners at the phonological level. A sequence-recall task with memory load and high phonetic variability was applied in the study. Language specific perceptual patterns were found for the two groups. Mandarin listeners outperformed Dutch listeners on encoding non-native pitch contour and pitch level contrasts on each position. Overall Mandarin listeners‟ perception of non-native tones was independent on the position. However, they needed contextual tonal references when encoding non-native pitch level contrasts. Dutch listeners showed perceptual difficulties in encoding pitch contrasts phonologically and were found partially “tone deaf” due to the lack of representations of contrastive tonal categories in their native language. They showed an overall preference for the word final position than word initial and word middle position when perceiving non-native tones.

Are lexical tones musical? Native language’s influence on neural response to pitch in different domains

HighlightsTone and non‐tone language speakers show comparable MMNs to lexical tones.Tone and non‐tone language speakers show MMNs to individual notes in music melodies.LDN to lexical tones is observed among non‐tone language speakers.LDN to musical melodies is observed among both tone and non‐tone language speakers.Lexical tone and music MMN correlate only among non‐tone language speakers. &NA; Language experience shapes musical and speech pitch processing. We investigated whether speaking a lexical tone language natively modulates neural processing of pitch in language and music as well as their correlation. We tested tone language (Mandarin Chinese), and non‐tone language (Dutch) listeners in a passive oddball paradigm measuring mismatch negativity (MMN) for (i) Chinese lexical tones and (ii) three‐note musical melodies with similar pitch contours. For lexical tones, Chinese listeners showed a later MMN peak than the non‐tone language listeners, whereas for MMN amplitude there were no significant differences between groups. Dutch participants also showed a late discriminative negativity (LDN). In the music condition two MMNs, corresponding to the two notes that differed between the standard and the deviant were found for both groups, and an LDN were found for both the Dutch and the Chinese listeners. The music MMNs were significantly right lateralized. Importantly, significant correlations were found between the lexical tone and the music MMNs for the Dutch but not the Chinese participants. The results suggest that speaking a tone language natively does not necessarily enhance neural responses to pitch either in language or in music, but that it does change the nature of neural pitch processing: non‐tone language speakers appear to perceive lexical tones as musical, whereas for tone language speakers, lexical tones and music may activate different neural networks. Neural resources seem to be assigned differently for the lexical tones and for musical melodies, presumably depending on the presence or absence of long‐term phonological memory traces.

Individualized early prediction of familial risk of dyslexia : A study of infant vocabulary development

We examined early vocabulary development in children at familial risk (FR) of dyslexia and typically developing (TD) children between 17 and 35 months of age. We trained a support vector machine to classify TD and FR using these vocabulary data at the individual level. The Dutch version of the McArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (Words and Sentences) (N-CDI) was used to measure vocabulary development. We analyzed group-level differences for both total vocabulary as well as lexical classes: common nouns, predicates, and closed class words. The generalizability of the classification model was tested using cross-validation. At the group level, for both total vocabulary and the composites, the difference between TD and FR was most pronounced at 19–20 months, with FRs having lower scores. For the individual prediction, highest cross-validation accuracy (68%) was obtained at 19–20 months, with sensitivity (correctly classified FR) being 70% and specificity (correctly classified TD) being 67%. There is a sensitive window in which the difference between FR and TD is most evident. Machine learning methods are promising techniques for separating FR and TD children at an early age, before they start reading.