Musicality and perception of Estonian as a foreign language by Chinese speakers

Abstract

This study compared Chinese musicians’ and non-musicians’ performance on a same-different discrimination task to examine whether and how musical experience influenced tonal language speakers’ perception of the Estonian quantity. Musicians outperformed non-musicians in the duration condition regardless of the stimulus type. This indicates that musicality benefits perception of cues not present in native language. In the conditions where pitch cue was present, musicians and non-musicians performed similarly. This could be because language experience shapes the brain to be more sensitive to the perception of the linguistically relevant cues, which in the case of Chinese speakers is pitch. Both groups were better at perceiving word stimuli than pure tone stimuli. Taken together, results suggest that native language experience overrides musicality, at least at the attentive level.