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Effects of first language background and musical experience on cue weighting, attention, and dimensional salience in speech and music
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Poster D74 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Magdalena Kachlicka1,2, Ashley E. Symons1, Kazuya Saito2, Fred Dick2, Adam T. Tierney1; 1Birkbeck, University of London, 2University College London
What factors determine the importance placed on different sources of evidence during speech and music perception? Attention-to-dimension theories of speech perception suggest that, throughout the lifetime of exposure to their first language (L1), listeners become biased to attend to acoustic dimensions which are especially informative in that language (Francis et al., 2000; Holt et al., 2018). Musical experience may be another factor shaping listening strategies, since attention to acoustic dimensions is essential to musical training (Patel, 2014). Here we explore how L1 background and musical experience influence neural sound encoding, dimension-selective attention, cue-weighting strategies and dimensional salience in speech and music. 54 native English and 60 Mandarin Chinese speakers (29 musicians in each language group) were assessed on their dimension-selective attention and cue preferences in categorizing linguistic features (phrase boundary, linguistic focus and lexical stress) and musical beats. Cue-weighting strategies were measured with categorization tasks in which participants were presented with speech and music stimuli that varied orthogonally along pitch and duration and categorized them as belonging to the appropriate category (e.g., deciding which word within a short phrase was emphasized). During the behavioural attention and EEG salience tasks, participants listened to sequences of sounds (complex tone or vowel) changing in pitch and duration at two different rates (1 Hz or 0.67 Hz). In the attention task, they paid attention to one dimension while ignoring changes in the other dimension and detected occasional repetitions within the attended stream. In the EEG salience task, the inter-trial phase coherence at the tagged dimension change rate provided a measure of dimensional salience. Moreover, lower-level neural encoding of pitch was assessed using the frequency-following response so that effects of musical training and language background could be assessed at earlier and later stages of the auditory system. Mandarin speakers, compared to native English speakers, showed enhanced attention to and preferential use of pitch across behavioural tasks (up-weighting pitch during prosody and musical beats categorisation and demonstrating superior attention to pitch). However, there was no effect of language background on neural entrainment to acoustic dimensions. One possible explanation of these results is that although tone language speakers benefit from an enhanced ability to direct endogenous attention to pitch when it is task-relevant, they do not experience increased involuntary exogenous capture of attention by pitch. Nevertheless, the frequency-following response to stimulus pitch was enhanced in Mandarin speakers, suggesting that speaking a tone language can boost processing of early pitch encoding, without affecting pitch salience. Comparison of cue weighting strategies between musicians and non-musicians revealed that musical training sharpens tuning to the dimension most relevant to a given categorization task – a pattern of responses suggesting that effects of musical training might depend on L1 background. Our results are consistent with attention-to-dimension theories of cue weighting which claim that listeners redirect their attention toward the most informative cues and those relevant for a given task.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,