The separation between music and speech: evidence from the perception of Cantonese tones

This study investigates the relationship between music and speech, testing whether musical training has any facilitatory effects on native tone language speakers. Some Cantonese tone pairs are merging in recent years. The merging subjects have poorer general lexical tone perception than the control subjects. Previous studies showed that musical training facilitates lexical tone perception of nontone language speakers, but it is unclear if the same is true for tone language speakers. Three groups of listeners (standard Cantonese, merging Cantonese, nontone) with and without musical training participated in AX discrimination tasks of Cantonese monosyllables and pure tones resynthesized from Cantonese lexical tones. Results show that while musical training enhances lexical tone perception of nontone listeners, it has little influence on Cantonese listeners. The findings suggest that the linguistic use of tones is more fundamental and more robust than musical tones. Our results are compatible with the idea that linguistic and musical mechanisms belong to separate but overlapping domains.