Perception of Chinese language by Estonian musicians and non-musicians

Abstract

Music and speech have been found to have common features that serve as cues for musical and speech perception. In tonal languages such as Chinese, the meaning of a word is conveyed mainly by a change in pitch. This study examines the differences between Estonian musicians and non-musicians in their perception of Chinese. A total of 46 musicians and nonmusicians who speak Estonian as native language were recruited. Data was collected through an AX discrimination experiment. Stimuli was the Chinese word JIDI and its non-linguistic equivalents (i.e., pure tones). There were three conditions, where subjects behaviorally discriminated duration change only, pitch change only, and duration + pitch change. It was found that musicians are significantly better than non-musicians at discriminating both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli in all three conditions. The result of this study suggests that musicality has a positive effect on language perception.