Effects of Language and Music Learning on Pitch and Duration Perception: an Experimental Investigation

The ability to discriminate pitch and duration is fundamental for the processing of both music and spoken language. There is now consistent evidence that an intensive musical training may improve the ability to discriminate sound changes not only in musical but also in linguistic stimuli so that studying music may help learning foreign languages. By contrast, evidence for the reverse claim - a real transfer from linguistic experience to musical aptitude - is still lacking. This research investigates whether linguistic and musical competences can mutually influence each other especially as far as pitch and duration are concerned. Three groups of subjects (i.e. Naïves, Musicians and Bilinguals) performed a discrimination task on sound stimuli that were either linguistic (Japanese words) or musical (isolated notes), and differed in either duration (tempi and syllable lengths) or pitch (tones and stresses). Results showed that besides regular music practice, also an early but not a late exposure to foreign languages strongly improves pitch but not duration discrimination.