![]() Consistent with previous studies, Cantonese language experience appeared to facilitate musical pitch perception. Essentially, an interactive effect of language and musicianship was found on musical pitch but not rhythmic perception. Cantonese and English listeners, each divided into musician and non-musician groups, completed the Musical Ear Test and the Raven's 2 Progressive Matrices. To address this research gap, I investigated the interactive effect of language and musicianship on musical pitch and rhythmic perception. However, the precise nature of this facilitation is not fully understood. Interestingly, growing evidence also suggests that language experience can facilitate music perception. Given its practical implications, the effect of musicianship on language learning has been vastly researched. In sum, online administration of the MET proved to be a reliable and valid way to measure musical ability. For the final sample (N = 608), findings were similar to those from in-person testing in many respects: (1) the internal reliability of the MET was maintained, (2) construct validity was confirmed by strong associations with Gold-MSI scores, (3) correlations with other measures (e.g., openness to experience, cognitive ability, mind-wandering) were as predicted, (4) mean levels of performance were similar for individuals with no music training, and (5) musical sophistication was a better predictor of performance on the Melody than on the Rhythm subtest. Approximately 20% of the participants were excluded for incomplete responding or failing to finish the testing session. The testing session also included the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI), a test of general cognitive ability, and self-report questionnaires that measured basic demographics (age, education, gender), mind-wandering, and personality. Both subtests had 52 trials, each of which required participants to determine whether standard and comparison auditory sequences were identical. A sample of 754 participants was tested with an online version of the Musical Ear Test (MET), which had Melody and Rhythm subtests. We sought to determine whether an objective test of musical ability could be successfully administered online. An ‘L1-Modulated Domain-General Account’ is proposed to formally describe the empirical findings from these studies: individual variability in tone learning facility is best captured by extralinguistic factors, but the relative effect of these factors may be modulated by a learner’s language background. Both L1-specific and extralinguistic factors explain why some individuals learn tones with more ease than others do, but these factors interact with one another in dynamic ways to determine tone learning facility. The findings from these empirical studies show that individuals differ greatly in the ease with which they learn non-native tones, particularly at a lexical level of tone processing. Chapter 6 provides a general discussion and conclusions. Chapter 5 reports a web-based study which involved 114 speakers from typologically different languages (Dutch, Swedish, Japanese, and Thai) and which reassesses the degree to which L1-specific and extralinguistic factors determine tone perception and lexical processing. Chapter 4 provides a comparative analysis between the perception and production tasks to discuss differences and similarities between performance in the listening and speaking modalities. Chapter 3 reports two further lab-based studies to investigate pre-lexical and lexical tone processing in the spoken modality to zoom in on individual variability in production. Chapter 2 reports a lab-based study in which 41 Mandarin and English speakers took part in a tone categorization and word identification task to investigate individual variability in pre-lexical and lexical tone perception. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction. ![]() The core of this dissertation consists of four empirical data chapters in the shape of journal manuscripts, which each zoom in on non-native tone learning through different lenses. In doing so, I aim to provide a novel and integral account of the multiplicity and diversity of factors that influence non-native tone learning facility. I examine the extent to which individual variability in tone learning facility depends on factors attributable to a learner’s first language, namely the function of pitch for lexical distinctions (‘L1 tonal status’) and the shapes of native tonal and intonational contrasts (‘tone type’), as well as extralinguistic factors, namely musical experience, working memory, and pitch perception aptitude. In this dissertation, I investigate how and why adults differ in the ease with which they learn tone in a non-native language. ![]()
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