Language Familiarity, Expectation, and Novice Musical Rhythm Production
John G Neuhoff & Pascale Lidji
Language and Speech (2014)
Sheng-Fu @2015/01/22
Introduction
What ties music and language together rhythmically ?
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300 pieces of work by English/French composers of classical music (Patel and Daniele, 2003)
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nPVI of musical notes
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rhythmic (stress) patterns reflect that of native speech
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- Huron and Ollen (2003) found similar results for 7000 pieces of music from 12 different languages
Unanswered in previous studies
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Classical composers and professional musicians only constitute a small and specialized population.
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extensive musical training, expertise, and elaborate cognitive framework
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Is such rhythmic connection between music and language more widespread?
Hypothesis for the present study
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Hypothesis: for amateur and novice musicians, native language would influence...
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perception of speech rhythm
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production of rhythmic variability
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- Nonnative speech of another rhythmic class would be perceived as perceptually more variable
- "language-specific listening" (Cutler & Otake, 1994)
- using perceptual regularities of the native language
- listening to nonnative speech -> perceiving variability/irregularity
- "language-specific listening" (Cutler & Otake, 1994)
Method
Participants
- English: 18 female and 6 male undergraduates from US, 18-22 years old. Did not speak French.
- limited experience playing musical instruments (mean = 5.1 years, sd = 3.8 years)
- French: 21 female and 3 male students from Montreal, 18-31 years old. French-speaking family. English education starting from 10 years old.
- limited experience playing musical instruments (mean = 6.4 years, sd = 3.3 years)
Design and procedure
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Musical rhythmic production:
- using two keys on a keyboard to produce "regular" and "English/French" tunes.
- nPVI for notes
- Perception of rhythm in speech
- rating 2 native and 2 nonnative speech recordings
- nPVI: English = 52.2, French = 35.5
- rhythmic variability on a 1-100 scale
- 1 = regular = 500 IOI
- 100 = random pattern of clicks with IOI from 100-900
- rating 2 native and 2 nonnative speech recordings
- Recognition task (two weeks later, surprise!)
- identifying participants own tunes (2AFC)
Results
Musical rhythmic production
- Significant interaction
- English speaker's French tune is more variable than their regular tune
Perception of rhythm in speech
- Significant interaction
- Both groups rated nonnative speech as more variable
Recognition task
- English speakers recognize their own tunes at rates above chance level for both types of tunes.
- French speakers recognize their own tunes at rates above chance level for both types of tunes.
- (The authors used Chi-square tests?!)
Discussion and Conclusion
the (un)familiarity effect
- Both English and French participants perceive nonnative speech as more variable
- despite greater objective rhythmic variability of English
- English speakers also produced more variable French tunes
the (un)familiarity effect (cont.)
- Explanation 1: unfamiliar speech is simply perceived as more variable
- rhythmic expectations not met
- overrides objective acoustic variability (high nPVI for English speech, but still less variable for English listeners)
- Explanation 2: paying attention to semantic messages in native speech so that rhythm is neglected
- more attention to the nonnative leads to higher variability
- Future work: low-pass filtered speech
The tunes
- Production of the novel tunes seem to be based on stable rhythmic representation
- accurate in identifying own tunes
- Potential issue: playing familiar tunes?
- but it would not explain the interaction (familiarity effect)
- but it would be hard for novices to do so (with two notes)
- but the produced tunes lack organized rhythmic structure
- also, it should be more true for experts because they pay attention to musical structures
Conclusion
- Evidence of a rhythmic relationship between music and language
- Even for musical amateurs and novices!
- although not directly comparable to studies on experts because of task differences
Language Familiarity, Expectation, and Novice Musical Rhythm Production
By sftwang0416
Language Familiarity, Expectation, and Novice Musical Rhythm Production
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