| Psychophysiological evidence supports an association between music and speech such that experience in one domain is related to processing in the other. Musicianship has been associated with benefits to auditory processing and executive function. It is unclear, however, whether pitch processing experience in nonmusical contexts, namely speaking a tone language, has comparable associations with auditory processing and executive function. The present investigation aimed to clarify this association, with the overarching goal of better understanding how two different types of pitch processing are linked to perceptual and cognitive processing. If pitch-processing experience gained via musicianship or tone-language use shapes perceptual and cognitive processes in similar ways, then musicians and tone-language speakers (nonmusicians) should outperform controls without music training or tone-language experience. This hypothesis was tested in a series of experiments that measured behavioural and neural responses of tone-language speakers and musicians on tasks of perception (pitch discrimination, pitch encoding, i.e., representation of pitch-relevant information) and cognition (pitch memory, visual working memory). Collectively, the findings reveal that benefits to auditory processing are more closely associated with music training than with tone-language use. When musicians and tone-language speakers performed comparably on behavioural tasks, this occurred at the perceptual level (i.e., sound discrimination). Differential responsiveness of tone-language speakers or musicians was evident at the neural level (i.e., event-related potentials, brain-signal variability). Neither musicianship nor speaking a tone language was associated with a benefit to visual working memory. These results are discussed in relation to the respective contributions of nature and nurture to auditory processing and visual working memory in musicians and tone-language speakers. |
