Music-to-language transfer effect: May melodic ability improve learning of tonal languages by native nontonal speakers?

In tonal languages, as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tones. Previous studies suggest that lexical tones are processed by native listeners as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information. This study aims at verifying if, in nontonal languages speakers, the discrimination of lexical Mandarin tones varies in function of the melodic ability. Forty-six students with no previous experience of Mandarin or any other tonal language were presented with two short lists of spoken monosyllabic Mandarin words and invited to perform a same-different task trying to identify whether the variation were phonological or tonal. Main results show that subjects perform significantly better in identifying phonological variations rather than tonal ones and interestingly, the group with a high melodic ability (assessed by Wing subtest 3) shows a better performance exclusively in detecting tonal variations. © Marta Olivetti Belardinelli and Springer-Verlag 2006.