Modulation of musical experience and prosodic complexity on lexical pitch learning

Abstract

Linguistic and non-linguistic factors, such as native language background and musical experience, were shown contributing to second language acquisition. The current study compares not only native tonal and non-tonal language participants, but also tonal languages with different prosodic complexities (high versus low), thus, examines the impact of prosodic complexity and musical experience on non-native tone identification and tone word learning. Native tonal language with higher (Cantonese) and lower (Mandarin) prosodic complexity, and non-tonal language (English) participants, with and without musical experience, attended non-native (Thai) tone word training. They also completed non-linguistic pitch perception, pre-training tone identification and tone word discrimination tasks. It is striking that the individual effects and interaction of prosodic complexity and musical experience vary across different contexts and stages of learning, whereby prosodic complexity effect was found to be the most consistent. Moreover, tone identification scores, but not pitch perception scores, were significantly correlated to tone word learning performance. The findings illustrated prosodic complexity and musical experience carry dynamic roles in influencing tone identification and different stages of tone word learning.