Children with less sensitive auditory pitch discrimination abilities may rely more on auditory feedback and thus may be less adept at updating their stored motor programs. Children with less sensitive auditory pitch discrimination abilities had significantly larger vocal response magnitudes to unexpected pitch-shifts and significantly smaller vocal response magnitudes to sustained pitch-shifts. Children were subdivided into two groups based on their auditory pitch discrimination abilities children within two standard deviations of the adult group were classified as having adult-like discrimination abilities (N = 11), whereas children outside of this range were classified as having less sensitive discrimination abilities than adults (N = 9). These pitch-shifts were either unexpected, providing information on auditory feedback control, or sustained, providing information on sensorimotor adaptation. Twenty children (6.6–11.7 years) and twenty adults (18–28 years) completed a listening task to determine auditory discrimination abilities to vocal fundamental frequency (fo) as well as two vocalization tasks in which their perceived fo was modulated in real-time. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between vocal pitch discrimination abilities and vocal responses to auditory pitch-shifts. Future research should therefore address the first hypothesis with participants from otherwise similar tonal and non-tonal varieties of the same language, where results from a tonal SRT may make a useful contribution to the typological debate on word prosody. The results suggest that a tonal SRT is not likely to discriminate between tonal and non-tonal languages within a typologically varied group, because of the effects of specific properties of their tone systems. An additional question concerned the extent to which accuracy scores depended on phonological and phonetic properties of a language’s tone system, like its complexity, the existence of an experimental contrast in a language’s phonology, and the phonetic salience of a contrast. Using participants from non-tonal Indonesian, semi-tonal Swedish, and two varieties of tonal Mandarin, we ran SRTs with monosyllabic tonal contrasts to test the hypothesis that high performance in a tonal SRT indicates the lexical status of tone. We address the question whether the Sequence Recall Task (SRT), which has been shown to discriminate between languages with and without word stress, can distinguish languages with and without lexical tone. One controversy concerns the existence of a typological class of “pitch accent languages,” another the underlying phonological nature of surface tone contrasts, which in some cases have been claimed to be metrical rather than tonal.
While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists. Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. These results suggest that musicality promotes earlier development of tone production only in earlier stages of prosodic development by the age of 6 years, the musicality advantage in tone production subsides.
It has been found that higher musicality is associated with higher contrastivity of the tones produced at the age of 4 and 5 years, but not at the age of 6 years. For each age (4, 5, and 6 years) and musicality (below or above the median score of each age group) group, the contrastivity of the four tones is evaluated by performing automatic tone classification using three sets of acoustic cues (F0, spectral cues, and both). Forty-three native Mandarin-speaking children between the ages of 4 and 6 years are recruited to participate in both a semi-spontaneous tone production task and a musicality test. This study aims to contribute toward a fuller understanding of the effect of musicality on linguistic pitch development via a close investigation of the relationship between musicality, age, and lexical tone production covering both F0 and spectral cues in children. Recent studies on language development have shown that differences in learners' musicality affect the F0 cue development in perception of sentence-level intonation or in prosodic realization of focus. Vocal pitch, which involves not only F0 but also multiple covarying acoustic cues is central to linguistic perception and production at various levels of prosodic structure.
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