Effects of varying musical training on the affective perception of speech

Abstract

Emotion in the psycholinguistic field has been investigated across many others, such as neurolinguistics, psychology and even in music studies. Past studies have shown that the main feature of speech in which emotion, or affect, is perceived from, is prosody. Linking this with music experience is a natural one, where the literature supports the claim that music experience confers positive pitch-processing abilities and thus affect-processing. However, a research gap on the types of musical experience exists, since past research tend to separate non-musician and musician only, without diving deeper into the meaning of being a musician and the different types of musicians. Hence, with varying musical backgrounds as a main factor of interest, together with other factors such as filter type (high-pass/low-pass) and intensity (high/low), the study aims to investigate affective prosody processing across different music groups. 25 Non- Chinese musicians (tonal and non-tonal musical training) and non-musicians underwent a series of tasks: firstly, to identify the emotion of the stimulus, secondly, to determine the intensity of the emotion chosen on a scale, and lastly to indicate one’s confidence level in the task. Results showed that tonal musicians are better and more confident at perceiving emotions and intensity than non-tonal musicians. No significant difference was found between the performances of non-tonal musicians and nonmusicians. High-pass filtered and high intensity stimuli were conditions in which participants scored better as well, due to greater relevance to real-life speech and larger pitch contrasts respectively. In conclusion, the findings reflect how varying the different kinds of musical experience can be, and also the specificity in positive transfers between music and language.