Musical Pitch Processing And Foreign Language Intonation Imitating

The similarities and differences between music and language have been studiedand debated by researchers for a very long time. Some researchers argue for sharedprocessing, some provide evidence for separate cognitive modules, and othersemphasize a cautious stand on drawing strong connections. However, previous studieshave generally confirmed the existence of a cross-domain correlation. The presentstudy focuses on the musical ability to process pitch and the linguistic ability toprocess, and particularly, imitate intonation patterns. To what extent are these twoabilities related?Chapter One of this thesis starts with an introduction to the three viewpointsmentioned above, as well as research findings pertaining to the relation betweenlanguage and music. After that, Chapter Two goes on with a review of previousstudies, and introduces and comments on four aspects in particular (participants,operational definition, tests for musical abilities, and tests for language abilities) inpreparation for the design of experiments needed in the the current study. At thebeginning of Chapter Three, the three research questions are outlined:(i) do betterpitch processing abilities predict better intonation imitating abilities in an unfamiliarforeign language?,(ii) do participants with better pitch processing abilities imitateintonation better both at the start of imitation and after some repetitions?, and (iii) doparticipants with better pitch processing abilities generally show larger improvementsthan other individuals after some repetitions? Two online pitch perception tests, onepitch production test that was especially designed for this study, and one foreignlanguage imitation test, also designed for this study, are employed to collect the data.The software programs Goldwave and Praat, are used to do initial processing of thecollected data, and analyses are carried out with the help of SPSS in Chapter Four.By means of investigating the correlation between the intonation imitationperformances on a foreign language and individuals’ pitch processing abilities, wefound that participants with better pitch processing abilities tended to have better overall intonation imitating performance, not only in a familiar foreign language(English), but also in an unfamiliar one (Thai). Among the three different pitchprocessing abilities, the ability to detect pitch direction (of fine-grained pitch contrastcomprised of two discrete notes) was found to be significantly correlated with neitherEnglish nor Thai. The ability to detect the existence of pitch changes was found to besignificantly correlated with performance of intonation in Thai. The ability to producepitch sequences precisely was found to be significantly correlated with imitation ofintonation in English, but only marginally correlated with that in Thai.An investigation into the correlation between different trials of each languageand the pitch processing abilities showed that participants with better pitch-changedetection ability did not tend to stand out in their first trials, but they showed betteroverall performance later in trial4s when imitating Thai. Participants with better pitchproduction ability tended to imitate English better than others at the first trials, andretained this advantage after three times of repetitions within a short period. Thus, wediscovered an interesting phenomenon that the ability to detect pitch changes seemedmore inclined to facilitate imitation of intonation in an unfamiliar foreign languagelike Thai, while the ability to produce pitch seemed more inclined to facilitateimitation of intonation in a familiar one, such as English.No previous studies have done such cross-language and cross-trial research.Although the current study is still a rather preliminary one, and its ambitions mayseem a little risky, the exploration into the unknown may not only be interesting butalso encouraging. If any research could draw inspiration from the present study in thefuture, its efforts will not have been in vain.