Effects of production training and perception training on lexical tone perception -- Are the effects domain general or domain specific?

The relationship between speech perception and production has been debated for a long time. The Motor Theory of speech perception (Liberman et al., 1989) claims that perceiving speech is identifying the intended articulatory gestures rather than perceiving the sound patterns. It seems to suggest that speech production precedes speech perception, i.e., only when people can accurately 'feel' their vocal tract gestures, can they successfully perceive speech. One prediction that falls out from the Motor Theory is that training people to produce sounds should be more effective for improving the perceptual ability than training people to only perceive sounds. My dissertation aims to test this prediction by comparing the effects of laboratory perception training and production training as well as the effects of different musical backgrounds (i.e., vocalists and instrumentalists) on the perception of lexical tones.;The present dissertation encompasses three experiments. The first experiment compared native English non-musicians, instrumentalists and vocalists on the perception and production of Mandarin tones. The results supported previous findings, demonstrating the advantage of musical training on lexical tone perception. However, no additional benefit was found for musicians with vocal experience in addition to instrumental experience on either lexical tone perception or production. The second experiment recorded both behavioral and electrophysiological data to examine the effectiveness of a perception-only training and a perception-plus-production training on lexical tone perception. The data showed that after training participants in both groups improved on tone discrimination. Moreover, the participants in both groups did not differ in tone processing at the intentional or unintentional level after training. The third experiment, using identification training rather than the discrimination training, demonstrated that the identification-plus-imitation group identified the tones more quickly in the post-training task than in the pre-training task while the identification-only group did not show any improvement in terms of reaction time. These results suggested that the employment of the motor system does not specifically benefit the tone perceptual skills.