Schedule 18. Sprachwissenschaftliche Tagung für Promotionsstudierende

A considerable amount of literature has been devoted to examining whether musical training and/or experience facilitates lexical tone perception. Nevertheless, not many studies have investigated the effects of musical training or experience on the learning of lexical tone perception, and there is no research on the learning of Japanese lexical pitch accent perception. With respect to perceptual learning, although a lot of research demonstrate the effectiveness of high variability phonetic training (HVPT), including for Japanese pitch accent (Shport 2016), the benefits of talker variability in training may be uneven among participants (Silpachai 2020).

To address these issues, my PhD study mainly aims at examining whether musical training and experience have any effects on the perceptual learning of Japanese pitch accent by Italians with no prior knowledge of Japanese. Given this aim, the present project consists of two experiments.

With respect to Experiment 1 (HVPT on Japanese pitch accent), the methodology is mostly based on Shport (2016), with three novel aspects:

* There are two categories of participants: musicians and non-musicians.
* These two categories are further subdivided into two groups in the training phase: high variability input (stimuli recorded by multiple talkers) group and low variability input (stimuli recorded by a single talker) group.
* The experiment will be conducted online.

Experiment 2, on musical note identification by musicians (a replication of Lee & Hung (2008), is to identify musicians with absolute pitch. Burnham et al. (2015) showed that musicians with absolute pitch were better than musicians without absolute pitch at discriminating Thai lexical tone. It would thus be interesting to see whether this finding also applies to the learners in my research.

Since previous experiments were conducted in a laboratory, one of the methodological challenges this study faces is conducting these experiments remotely using the Gorilla software (https://gorilla.sc). I piloted the software by carrying out Experiment 1 on non-musicians to troubleshoot before adding Experiment 2. The software worked well and the training was effective, especially with low variability input. In my presentation, I will conclude by providing a roadmap of future experiments and discussing the implications of this study for language teaching.

References

Burnham, Denis, Ron Brooker & Amanda Reid. 2015. The effects of absolute pitch ability and musical training on lexical tone perception. Psychology of Music 43(6), 881–897.
Lee, Chao-Yang & Tsun-Hui Hung. 2008. Identification of Mandarin tones by English- speaking musicians and nonmusicians. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 124(5), 3235–3248.
Shport, Irina A. 2016. Training English Listeners to Identify Pitch-Accent Patterns in Tokyo Japanese. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 38(4), 739–769.
Silpachai, Alif. 2020. The role of talker variability in the perceptual learning of Mandarin tones by American English listeners. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation, 209–235.

Info

Day: 2021-09-24
Start time: 14:50
Duration: 00:40
Room: Don Giovanni

Language: en

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