Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A Registered Report.

Both music and language are found in all known human societies, yet no studies have compared similarities and differences between song, speech, and instrumental music on a global scale. In this Registered Report, we analyzed two global datasets: (i) 300 annotated audio recordings representing matched sets of traditional songs, recited lyrics, conversational speech, and instrumental melodies from our 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages; and (ii) 418 previously published adult-directed song and speech recordings from 209 individuals speaking 16 languages. Of our six preregistered predictions, five were strongly supported: Relative to speech, songs use (i) higher pitch, (ii) slower temporal rate, and (iii) more stable pitches, while both songs and speech used similar (iv) pitch interval size and (v) timbral brightness. Exploratory analyses suggest that features vary along a "musi-linguistic" continuum when including instrumental melodies and recited lyrics. Our study provides strong empirical evidence of cross-cultural regularities in music and speech.

In "Tone" with dogs: exploring canine musicality.

This study investigates the musical perception skills of dogs through playback experiments. Dogs were trained to distinguish between two different target locations based on a sequence of four ascending or descending notes. A total of 16 dogs of different breeds, age, and sex, but all of them with at least basic training, were recruited for the study. Dogs received training from their respective owners in a suitable environment within their familiar home settings. The training sequence consisted of notes [Do-Mi-Sol#-Do (C7-E7-G7#-C8; Hz frequency: 2093, 2639, 3322, 4186)] digitally generated as pure sinusoidal tones. The training protocol comprised 3 sequential training levels, with each level consisting of 4 sessions with a minimum of 10 trials per session. In the test phase, the sequence was transposed to evaluate whether dogs used relative pitch when identifying the sequences. A correct response by the dog was recorded as 1, while an incorrect response, occurring when the dog chose the opposite zone of the bowl, was marked as 0. Statistical analyses were performed using a binomial test. Among 16 dogs, only two consistently performed above the chance level, demonstrating the ability to recognize relative pitch, even with transposed sequences. This study suggests that dogs may have the ability to attend to relative pitch, a critical aspect of human musicality.

The Multimodal Trust Effects of Face, Voice, and Sentence Content.

Trust is an aspect critical to human social interaction and research has identified many cues that help in the assimilation of this social trait. Two of these cues are the pitch of the voice and the width-to-height ratio of the face (fWHR). Additionally, research has indicated that the content of a spoken sentence itself has an effect on trustworthiness; a finding that has not yet been brought into multisensory research. The current research aims to investigate previously developed theories on trust in relation to vocal pitch, fWHR, and sentence content in a multimodal setting. Twenty-six female participants were asked to judge the trustworthiness of a voice speaking a neutral or romantic sentence while seeing a face. The average pitch of the voice and the fWHR were varied systematically. Results indicate that the content of the spoken message was an important predictor of trustworthiness extending into multimodality. Further, the mean pitch of the voice and fWHR of the face appeared to be useful indicators in a multimodal setting. These effects interacted with one another across modalities. The data demonstrate that trust in the voice is shaped by task-irrelevant visual stimuli. Future research is encouraged to clarify whether these findings remain consistent across genders, age groups, and languages.

Aging affects auditory contributions to focus perception in Jianghuai Mandarina).

Speakers can place their prosodic prominence on any locations within a sentence, generating focus prosody for listeners to perceive new information. This study aimed to investigate age-related changes in the bottom-up processing of focus perception in Jianghuai Mandarin by clarifying the perceptual cues and the auditory processing abilities involved in the identification of focus locations. Young, middle-aged, and older speakers of Jianghuai Mandarin completed a focus identification task and an auditory perception task. The results showed that increasing age led to a decrease in listeners' accuracy rate in identifying focus locations, with all participants performing the worst when dynamic pitch cues were inaccessible. Auditory processing abilities did not predict focus perception performance in young and middle-aged listeners but accounted significantly for the variance in older adults' performance. These findings suggest that age-related deteriorations in focus perception can be largely attributed to declined auditory processing of perceptual cues. Poor ability to extract frequency modulation cues may be the most important underlying psychoacoustic factor for older adults' difficulties in perceiving focus prosody in Jianghuai Mandarin. The results contribute to our understanding of the bottom-up mechanisms involved in linguistic prosody processing in aging adults, particularly in tonal languages.

Genetic association analysis of human median voice pitch identifies a common locus for tonal and non-tonal languages.

The genetic influence on human vocal pitch in tonal and non-tonal languages remains largely unknown. In tonal languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, pitch changes differentiate word meanings, whereas in non-tonal languages, such as Icelandic, pitch is used to convey intonation. We addressed this question by searching for genetic associations with interindividual variation in median pitch in a Chinese major depression case-control cohort and compared our results with a genome-wide association study from Iceland. The same genetic variant, rs11046212-T in an intron of the ABCC9 gene, was one of the most strongly associated loci with median pitch in both samples. Our meta-analysis revealed four genome-wide significant hits, including two novel associations. The discovery of genetic variants influencing vocal pitch across both tonal and non-tonal languages suggests the possibility of a common genetic contribution to the human vocal system shared in two distinct populations with languages that differ in tonality (Icelandic and Mandarin).

Cortical specialization associated with native speech category acquisition in early infancy.

This study investigates neural processes in infant speech processing, with a focus on left frontal brain regions and hemispheric lateralization in Mandarin-speaking infants' acquisition of native tonal categories. We tested 2- to 6-month-old Mandarin learners to explore age-related improvements in tone discrimination, the role of inferior frontal regions in abstract speech category representation, and left hemisphere lateralization during tone processing. Using a block design, we presented four Mandarin tones via [ta] and measured oxygenated hemoglobin concentration with functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Results showed age-related improvements in tone discrimination, greater involvement of frontal regions in older infants indicating abstract tonal representation development and increased bilateral activation mirroring native adult Mandarin speakers. These findings contribute to our broader understanding of the relationship between native speech acquisition and infant brain development during the critical period of early language learning.

Temporal pitch matching with bilateral cochlear implants.

Interaural pitch matching is a common task used with bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users, although studies measuring this have largely focused on place-based pitch matches. Temporal-based pitch also plays an important role in CI users' perception, but interaural temporal-based pitch matching has not been well characterized for CI users. To investigate this, bilateral CI users were asked to match amplitude modulation frequencies of stimulation across ears. Comparisons were made to previous place-based pitch matching data that were collected using similar procedures. The results indicate that temporal-based pitch matching is particularly sensitive to the choice of reference ear.

Effects of absolute pitch on brain activation and functional connectivity during hearing-in-noise perception.

Hearing-in-noise (HIN) ability is crucial in speech and music communication. Recent evidence suggests that absolute pitch (AP), the ability to identify isolated musical notes, is associated with HIN benefits. A theoretical account postulates a link between AP ability and neural network indices of segregation. However, how AP ability modulates the brain activation and functional connectivity underlying HIN perception remains unclear. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to contrast brain responses among a sample (n = 45) comprising 15 AP musicians, 15 non-AP musicians, and 15 non-musicians in perceiving Mandarin speech and melody targets under varying signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs: No-Noise, 0, -9 dB). Results reveal that AP musicians exhibited increased activation in auditory and superior frontal regions across both HIN domains (music and speech), irrespective of noise levels. Notably, substantially higher sensorimotor activation was found in AP musicians when the target was music compared to speech. Furthermore, we examined AP effects on neural connectivity using psychophysiological interaction analysis with the auditory cortex as the seed region. AP musicians showed decreased functional connectivity with the sensorimotor and middle frontal gyrus compared to non-AP musicians. Crucially, AP differentially affected connectivity with parietal and frontal brain regions depending on the HIN domain being music or speech. These findings suggest that AP plays a critical role in HIN perception, manifested by increased activation and functional independence between auditory and sensorimotor regions for perceiving music and speech streams.

Weighting of cues to categorization of song versus speech in tone-language and non-tone-language speakers.

One of the most important auditory categorization tasks a listener faces is determining a sound's domain, a process which is a prerequisite for successful within-domain categorization tasks such as recognizing different speech sounds or musical tones. Speech and song are universal in human cultures: how do listeners categorize a sequence of words as belonging to one or the other of these domains? There is growing interest in the acoustic cues that distinguish speech and song, but it remains unclear whether there are cross-cultural differences in the evidence upon which listeners rely when making this fundamental perceptual categorization. Here we use the speech-to-song illusion, in which some spoken phrases perceptually transform into song when repeated, to investigate cues to this domain-level categorization in native speakers of tone languages (Mandarin and Cantonese speakers residing in the United Kingdom and China) and in native speakers of a non-tone language (English). We find that native tone-language and non-tone-language listeners largely agree on which spoken phrases sound like song after repetition, and we also find that the strength of this transformation is not significantly different across language backgrounds or countries of residence. Furthermore, we find a striking similarity in the cues upon which listeners rely when perceiving word sequences as singing versus speech, including small pitch intervals, flat within-syllable pitch contours, and steady beats. These findings support the view that there are certain widespread cross-cultural similarities in the mechanisms by which listeners judge if a word sequence is spoken or sung.

Frequency effects can modulate the neural correlates of prosodic processing in Mandarin.

In tonal languages, tone perception involves the processing of both acoustic and phonological information conveyed by tonal signals. In Mandarin, in addition to four canonical full tones, there exists a group of weak syllables known as neutral tones. This study aims to investigate the impact of lexical frequency effects and prosodic information associated with neutral tones on the auditory representation of Mandarin compounds. We initially selected disyllabic compounds as targets, manipulating their lexical frequencies and prosodic structures. Subsequently, these target compounds were embedded into selected sentences and auditorily presented to native speakers. During the experiments, participants engaged in lexical decision tasks while their event-related potentials were recorded. The results showed that the auditory lexical representation of disyllabic compounds was modulated by lexical frequency effects. Rare compounds and compounds with rare first constituents elicited larger N400 effects compared to frequent compounds. Furthermore, neutral tones were found to play a role in the processing, resulting in larger N400 effects. Our findings showed significantly increased amplitudes of the N400 component, suggesting that the processing of rare compounds and compounds with neutral tones may require more cognitive resources. Additionally, we observed an interaction effect between lexical frequency and neutral tones, indicating that they could serve as determining cues in the auditory processing of disyllabic compounds.

Investigating Perception to Production Transfer in Children With Cochlear Implants: A High Variability Phonetic Training Study.

PURPOSE: This study builds upon an established effective training method to investigate the advantages of high variability phonetic identification training for enhancing lexical tone perception and production in Mandarin-speaking pediatric cochlear implant (CI) recipients, who typically face ongoing challenges in these areas. METHOD: Thirty-two Mandarin-speaking children with CIs were quasirandomly assigned into the training group (TG) and the control group (CG). The 16 TG participants received five sessions of high variability phonetic training (HVPT) within a period of 3 weeks. The CG participants did not receive the training. Perception and production of Mandarin tones were administered before (pretest) and immediately after (posttest) the completion of HVPT via lexical tone recognition task and picture naming task. Both groups participated in the identical pretest and posttest with the same time frame between the two test sessions. RESULTS: TG showed significant improvement from pretest to posttest in identifying Mandarin tones for both trained and untrained speech stimuli. Moreover, perceptual learning of HVPT significantly facilitated trainees' production of T1 and T2 as rated by a cohort of 10 Mandarin-speaking adults with normal hearing, which was corroborated by acoustic analyses revealing improved fundamental frequency (F0) median for T1 and T2 production and enlarged F0 movement for T2 production. In contrast, TG children's production of T3 and T4 showed nonsignificant changes across two test sessions. Meanwhile, CG did not exhibit significant changes in either perception or production. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest a limited and inconsistent transfer of perceptual learning to lexical tone production in children with CIs, which challenges the notion of a robust transfer and highlights the complexity of the interaction between perceptual training and production outcomes. Further research on individual differences with a longitudinal design is needed to optimize the training protocol or tailor interventions to better meet the diverse needs of learners.

Mandarin-Speaking Amusics' Online Recognition of Tone and Intonation.

PURPOSE: Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of musical pitch processing. Its linguistic consequences have been examined separately for speech intonations and lexical tones. However, in a tonal language such as Chinese, the processing of intonations and lexical tones interacts with each other during online speech perception. Whether and how the musical pitch disorder might affect linguistic pitch processing during online speech perception remains unknown. METHOD: We investigated this question with intonation (question vs. statement) and lexical tone (rising Tone 2 vs. falling Tone 4) identification tasks using the same set of sentences, comparing behavioral and event-related potential measurements between Mandarin-speaking amusics and matched controls. We specifically focused on the amusics without behavioral lexical tone deficits (the majority, i.e., pure amusics). RESULTS: Results showed that, despite relative to normal performance when tested in word lexical tone test, pure amusics demonstrated inferior recognition than controls during sentence tone and intonation identification. Compared to controls, pure amusics had larger N400 amplitudes in question stimuli during tone task and smaller P600 amplitudes in intonation task. CONCLUSION: These data indicate that musical pitch disorder affects both tone and intonation processing during sentence processing even for pure amusics, whose lexical tone processing was intact when tested with words.

Auditory Processing of Intonational Rises and Falls in German: Rises Are Special in Attention Orienting.

This article investigates the processing of intonational rises and falls when presented unexpectedly in a stream of repetitive auditory stimuli. It examines the neurophysiological correlates (ERPs) of attention to these unexpected stimuli through the use of an oddball paradigm where sequences of repetitive stimuli are occasionally interspersed with a deviant stimulus, allowing for elicitation of an MMN. Whereas previous oddball studies on attention toward unexpected sounds involving pitch rises were conducted on nonlinguistic stimuli, the present study uses as stimuli lexical items in German with naturalistic intonation contours. Results indicate that rising intonation plays a special role in attention orienting at a pre-attentive processing stage, whereas contextual meaning (here a list of items) is essential for activating attentional resources at a conscious processing stage. This is reflected in the activation of distinct brain responses: Rising intonation evokes the largest MMN, whereas falling intonation elicits a less pronounced MMN followed by a P3 (reflecting a conscious processing stage). Subsequently, we also find a complex interplay between the phonological status (i.e., accent/head marking vs. boundary/edge marking) and the direction of pitch change in their contribution to attention orienting: Attention is not oriented necessarily toward a specific position in prosodic structure (head or edge). Rather, we find that the intonation contour itself and the appropriateness of the contour in the linguistic context are the primary cues to two core mechanisms of attention orienting, pre-attentive and conscious orientation respectively, whereas the phonological status of the pitch event plays only a supplementary role.

Tonal interference in word learning? A comparison of Cantonese and French.

Most languages of the world use lexical tones to contrast words. Thus, understanding how individuals process tones when learning new words is fundamental for a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying word learning. The current study asked how tonal information is integrated during word learning. We investigated whether variability in tonal information during learning can interfere with the learning of new words and whether this is language and age dependent. Cantonese- and French-learning 30-month-olds (N = 97) and Cantonese- and French-speaking adults (N = 50) were tested with an eye-tracking task on their ability to learn phonetically different pairs of novel words in two learning conditions: a 1-tone condition in which each object was named with a single label and a 3-tone condition in which each object was named with three different labels varying in tone. We predicted learning in all groups in the 1-tone condition. For the 3-tone condition, because tones are part of the phonological system of Cantonese but not of French, we expected the Cantonese groups to either fail (toddlers) or show lower performance than in the 1-tone condition (adults), whereas the French groups might show less sensitivity to this manipulation. The results show that all participants learned in the 1-tone condition and were sensitive to tone variation to some extent. Learning in the 3-tone condition was impeded in both groups of toddlers. We argue that tonal interference in word learning likely comes from the phonological level in the Cantonese groups and from the acoustic level in the French groups.

Stimulus-responsive and task-dependent activations in occipital regions during pitch perception by early blind listeners.

Although it has been established that cross-modal activations occur in the occipital cortex during auditory processing among congenitally and early blind listeners, it remains uncertain whether these activations in various occipital regions reflect sensory analysis of specific sound properties, non-perceptual cognitive operations associated with active tasks, or the interplay between sensory analysis and cognitive operations. This fMRI study aimed to investigate cross-modal responses in occipital regions, specifically V5/MT and V1, during passive and active pitch perception by early blind individuals compared to sighted individuals. The data showed that V5/MT was responsive to pitch during passive perception, and its activations increased with task complexity. By contrast, widespread occipital regions, including V1, were only recruited during two active perception tasks, and their activations were also modulated by task complexity. These fMRI results from blind individuals suggest that while V5/MT activations are both stimulus-responsive and task-modulated, activations in other occipital regions, including V1, are dependent on the task, indicating similarities and differences between various visual areas during auditory processing.

Encoding of melody in the human auditory cortex.

Melody is a core component of music in which discrete pitches are serially arranged to convey emotion and meaning. Perception varies along several pitch-based dimensions: (i) the absolute pitch of notes, (ii) the difference in pitch between successive notes, and (iii) the statistical expectation of each note given prior context. How the brain represents these dimensions and whether their encoding is specialized for music remains unknown. We recorded high-density neurophysiological activity directly from the human auditory cortex while participants listened to Western musical phrases. Pitch, pitch-change, and expectation were selectively encoded at different cortical sites, indicating a spatial map for representing distinct melodic dimensions. The same participants listened to spoken English, and we compared responses to music and speech. Cortical sites selective for music encoded expectation, while sites that encoded pitch and pitch-change in music used the same neural code to represent equivalent properties of speech. Findings reveal how the perception of melody recruits both music-specific and general-purpose sound representations.

Effect of musical expertise on the perception of duration and pitch in language: A cross-linguistic study.

This study adopts a cross-linguistic perspective and investigates how musical expertise affects the perception of duration and pitch in language. Native speakers of Chinese (N = 44) and Estonian (N = 46), each group subdivided into musicians and non-musicians, participated in a mismatch negativity (MMN) experiment where they passively listened to both Chinese and Estonian stimuli, followed by a behavioral experiment where they attentively discriminated the stimuli in the non-native language (i.e., Chinese to Estonian participants and Estonian to Chinese participants). In both experiments, stimuli of duration change, pitch change, and duration plus pitch change were discriminated. We found higher behavioral sensitivity among Chinese musicians than non-musicians in perceiving the duration change in Estonian and higher behavioral sensitivity among Estonian musicians than non-musicians in perceiving all types of changes in Chinese, but no corresponding effect was found in the MMN results, which suggests a more salient effect of musical expertise on foreign language processing when attention is required. Secondly, Chinese musicians did not outperform non-musicians in attentively discriminating the pitch-related stimuli in Estonian, suggesting that musical expertise can be overridden by tonal language experience when perceiving foreign linguistic pitch, especially when an attentive discrimination task is administered. Thirdly, we found larger MMN among Chinese and Estonian musicians than their non-musician counterparts in perceiving the largest deviant (i.e., duration plus pitch) in their native language. Taken together, our results demonstrate a positive effect of musical expertise on language processing.

Modelling Mandarin tone perception-production link through critical perceptual cues.

Theoretical accounts posit a close link between speech perception and production, but empirical findings on this relationship are mixed. To explain this apparent contradiction, a proposed view is that a perception-production relationship should be established through the use of critical perceptual cues. This study examines this view by using Mandarin tones as a test case because the perceptual cues for Mandarin tones consist of perceptually critical pitch direction and noncritical pitch height cues. The defining features of critical and noncritical perceptual cues and the perception-production relationship of each cue for each tone were investigated. The perceptual stimuli in the perception experiment were created by varying one critical and one noncritical perceptual cue orthogonally. The cues for tones produced by the same group of native Mandarin participants were measured. This study found that the critical status of perceptual cues primarily influenced within-category and between-category perception for nearly all tones. Using cross-domain bidirectional statistical modelling, a perception-production link was found for the critical perceptual cue only. A stronger link was obtained when within-category and between-category perception data were included in the models as compared to using between-category perception data alone, suggesting a phonetically and phonologically driven perception-production relationship.

Perception of Specific Musical Attributes in Dependence of the Insertion Depth of Cochlear Implant Electrodes Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia.

HYPOTHESIS: The insertion angle of the electrode array has an influence on the perception of different musical features. BACKGROUND: A deeper insertion of the electrodes is associated with a greater coverage of the cochlea with possible stimulus locations. This could lead to an improved or extended perception of pitches and pitch changes as well as to a better perception of contours in musical pieces. METHODS: A Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia test battery was conducted with a collective of 19 cochlear implant (CI) users and 9 normal-hearing subjects. For the CI users, the insertion angles of the intracochlear electrode arrays were calculated using Otoplan software. RESULTS: Compared with normal-hearing users, CI users performed worse in the detection of melodic features of music. CI users performed better with temporal features than with melodic features. An influence of the insertion depth of the electrodes on the results of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia could be proven neither for Cochlear nor for MED-EL CI users. CONCLUSION: Deeper insertion of electrode arrays may only better approximate the spatial-frequency map. Alone, it does not have an effect on better detection and identification of pitch and tonality and, consequently, better perception of musical attributes. Anatomy-based calculation of electrode locations and matching to characteristic frequencies will be sought in subsequent studies.

Musical training is not associated with spectral context effects in instrument sound categorization.

Musicians display a variety of auditory perceptual benefits relative to people with little or no musical training; these benefits are collectively referred to as the "musician advantage." Importantly, musicians consistently outperform nonmusicians for tasks relating to pitch, but there are mixed reports as to musicians outperforming nonmusicians for timbre-related tasks. Due to their experience manipulating the timbre of their instrument or voice in performance, we hypothesized that musicians would be more sensitive to acoustic context effects stemming from the spectral changes in timbre across a musical context passage (played by a string quintet then filtered) and a target instrument sound (French horn or tenor saxophone; Experiment 1). Additionally, we investigated the role of a musician's primary instrument of instruction by recruiting French horn and tenor saxophone players to also complete this task (Experiment 2). Consistent with the musician advantage literature, musicians exhibited superior pitch discrimination to nonmusicians. Contrary to our main hypothesis, there was no difference between musicians and nonmusicians in how spectral context effects shaped instrument sound categorization. Thus, musicians may only outperform nonmusicians for some auditory skills relevant to music (e.g., pitch perception) but not others (e.g., timbre perception via spectral differences).