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Speaking a tone language enhances musical pitch perception in 3–5‐year‐olds
Author(s) -
Creel Sarah C.,
Weng Mengxing,
Fu Genyue,
Heyman Gail D.,
Lee Kang
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/desc.12503
Subject(s) - psychology , timbre , mandarin chinese , tone (literature) , perception , pitch perception , musical , speech perception , pitch (music) , language development , cognition , cognitive psychology , linguistics , developmental psychology , art , philosophy , neuroscience , visual arts
Young children learn multiple cognitive skills concurrently (e.g., language and music). Evidence is limited as to whether and how learning in one domain affects that in another during early development. Here we assessed whether exposure to a tone language benefits musical pitch processing among 3-5-year-old children. More specifically, we compared the pitch perception of Chinese children who spoke a tone language (i.e., Mandarin) with English-speaking American children. We found that Mandarin-speaking children were more advanced at pitch processing than English-speaking children but both groups performed similarly on a control music task (timbre discrimination). The findings support the Pitch Generalization Hypothesis that tone languages drive attention to pitch in nonlinguistic contexts, and suggest that language learning benefits aspects of music perception in early development. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/UY0kpGpPNA0.