Musicians have better memory than nonmusicians: A meta-analysis

Background Several studies have found that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks, but this is not always the case, and the strength of this apparent advantage is unknown. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis with the aim of clarifying whether musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks. Methods Education Source; PEP (WEB)\u2014Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing; Psychology and Behavioral Science (EBSCO); PsycINFO (Ovid); PubMed; ScienceDirect\u2014AllBooks Content (Elsevier API); SCOPUS (Elsevier API); SocINDEX with Full Text (EBSCO) and Google Scholar were searched for eligible studies. The selected studies involved two groups of participants: young adult musicians and nonmusicians. All the studies included memory tasks (loading long-term, short-term or working memory) that contained tonal, verbal or visuospatial stimuli. Three meta-analyses were run separately for long-term memory, short-term memory and working memory. Results We collected 29 studies, including 53 memory tasks. The results showed that musicians performed better than nonmusicians in terms of long-term memory, g = .29, 95% CI (.08\u2013.51), short-term memory, g = .57, 95% CI (.41\u2013.73), and working memory, g = .56, 95% CI (.33\u2013.80). To further explore the data, we included a moderator (the type of stimulus presented, i.e., tonal, verbal or visuospatial), which was found to influence the effect size for short-term and working memory, but not for long-term memory. In terms of short-term and working memory, the musicians\u2019 advantage was large with tonal stimuli, moderate with verbal stimuli, and small or null with visuospatial stimuli. Conclusions The three meta-analyses revealed a small effect size for long-term memory, and a medium effect size for short-term and working memory, suggesting that musicians perform better than nonmusicians in memory tasks. Moreover, the effect of the moderator suggested that, the type of stimuli influences this advantage

Effect of musical training on lexical tone perception in Chinese dyslexic children

This study examined the effect of musical training on Cantonese lexical tone perception in Chinese dyslexics and normally developing readers. Experiment 1 compared perception of musical beats and lexical tone between normally developing children with music training and ones without music training to investigate the effect of musical training on lexical tone perception in normal children. Children with musical training performed significantly better than those without musical training in lexical tone identification and musical beats perception. Experiment 2 tested perception of lexical tone and music beats in dyslexic children with musical training, dyslexic children without musical training and normal controls without any musical training. The result showed that there was significant difference between dyslexic children without musical training and normal controls in lexical tone perception, but there was no significant difference between dyslexic children with musical training and normal controls, indicating that musical training was effective in improving lexical tone perception ability of dyslexic children. These imply that musical training could be an effective way to help dyslexic children read better.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

A Method of Teaching English Speaking Learners to Produce Mandarin-Chinese Tones

Learning Mandarin Chinese tones is a big challenge for English speaking learners. The average tonal production accuracy is reported to be about 70 percent for intermediate-level learners and 40 percent for beginning-level Chinese learners. The Chinese tonal proficiency significantly influences the learners\u27 communicative effectiveness, including listening and speaking, but research often overlooks tonal production. This study proposed and tested a novel method of teaching English-speaking learners to pronounce Mandarin Chinese tones. This teaching method includes a Chinese tones bookmark, and a 30--50 minutes in-class training module. The research undertook five cycles of Design-Based Research (DBR) implementations with 31 public school students, adult learners, and Chinese teachers. Two audio recordings, one pre-training and one post-training, were collected and compared through the paired samples t-tests. Interviews, surveys, and class observations were adopted to determine the participants\u27 attitudes toward the training and the teaching model. The results revealed that the designed teaching method was effective to improve the tonal production accuracy of English speaking K-12 children and adult learners. In addition, the results indicated that the participants\u27 attitudes toward the designed method were positive. This study contributes to the current Chinese tonal teaching repertoire and presents a flexible, practical method for teachers to use when instructing students on Chinese tones

Modulation of musical experience and prosodic complexity on lexical pitch learning

Poster Session 2: no. p2.08bWith a non-native (i.e., Thai) pitch-word learning task, the current study examined the impacts of prosodic complexity and musical experience on non-native tone identification and tone word learning by comparing musicians and non-musicians whose native languages exhibit different prosodic complexity, such as Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. We found that for the pre-training tone identification task, musicians outperformed non-musicians, regardless of their native language background. For the tone word learning task, Cantonese musicians outperformed English musicians at the beginning stage of tone word learning. No significant differences were found among non-musicians in the three languages. However, both Cantonese and Mandarin non-musicians outperformed English non-musicians in the final stage of learning, yet there was no difference between musicians. These findings underscore that prosodic complexity and musical experience have dynamic roles in influencing tone identification and tone word learning at different stages.postprin

Suprasegmental speech perception, working memory and reading comprehension in Cantonese-English bilingual children

This study set out to examine (a) lexical tone and stress perception by bilingual and monolingual children, (b) interrelationships between lexical pitches perception, general acoustic mechanism and working memory, and (c) the association between lexical tone awareness and Chinese text reading comprehension. Experiment 1 tested and compared the perception of Cantonese lexical tones, English lexical stress and nonlinguistic pitch between Cantonese-English bilingual and English monolingual children. The relationships between linguistic pitch perception, non-linguistic pitch perception and working memory were also examined among Cantonese-English bilingual children. Experiment 2 explored the relationship between Cantonese tone awareness and Chinese text reading comprehension skills. Results of this study illustrate differential performances in tone perception but similar performances in stress perception between bilinguals and monolinguals. In addition, inter-correlations were found between linguistic pitches perception, general acoustic mechanism, working memory and reading comprehension. These findings provide new insight to native and non-native perception of lexical pitches, and demonstrate an important link that exists between lexical tone awareness and reading comprehension.published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

Hakka tone training for native speakers of tonal and nontonal languages

Language learning becomes increasingly difficult when novel linguistic features are introduced. Studies have shown that learners from various language backgrounds can be trained to perceive lexical tone, which assigns meaning to words using variations in pitch. In this thesis, we investigated whether native speakers of tonal Mandarin Chinese and tonal Vietnamese outperformed native speakers of nontonal English when learning Hakka Chinese tones following five sessions of tone training, and whether the complexity (i.e., density) of a listener’s native tone inventory facilitated nonnative tone learning. All groups improved in tone identification and tone word learning following training, with improvements persisting three weeks following the cessation of training. Although both tonal groups outperformed the English group in most tasks, the Mandarin group showed the most consistent advantages over the English group across tasks. Findings suggest that tone experience bolsters tone learning, but density of the tone inventory does not provide an advantage. Confusion patterns offer detailed insight of the interaction between nonnative tones and native tonal and intonational categories

The Effects of Pitch Singing Training on Recognizing and Enunciating Chinese Tones

It is a challenge for non-tonal language speakers to enunciate the four Chinese tones accurately. In the present study, I examined whether musical training benefits tonal language learning, evaluated whether the pitch singing training influence recognizing and enunciating the four Chinese tones, and compared the effects of a pitch singing training method with the traditional audio-lingual method. The participants, 60 American college students who had not taken a Chinese course and who did not speak and write Chinese, were recruited in this study. The participants were divided evenly and randomly into two groups: the pitch singing training group and the traditional audio-lingual training group. They participated in a pretest/training/posttest program over the course of eight training sessions. Results revealed the pitch singing training method had a greater effect on both recognizing and enunciating the four Chinese tones than did the traditional audio-lingual method. The pitch singing training method can be used as an alternative and effective way to improve non-tonal language speakers’ recognition and enunciation of the four Chinese tones, because it provides a sensory experience to the learners, builds associations to the concept of abstract Chinese tones, and elaborates on learners’ memory of the Chinese tones to store it for a long-term retention

Composing literacy: Exploring how musical aptitude explains technical reading abilities

Several studies have indicated a connection between musical skills and reading-related abilities. However, the underlying reasons to the connection have been unclear. I studied whether subskills within musical aptitude can explain the relationship between music and reading in 8–11-year-old children (N = 66). The children were tested for musical aptitude subskills: pitch discrimination, temporal discrimination, and tonal memory. The focus lay on technical reading abilities, namely performance in reading fluency and sentence comprehension in the Finnish primary school reading test. Linear regression models were used to assess whether the subskills, both together and separately, account for the variance in reading performance. The combination of musical aptitude subskills was related to technical reading abilities. Independently of other subskills, tonal memory explained both reading fluency and sentence comprehension while pitch discrimination explained only reading fluency. The findings support the hypothesis that musical aptitude and reading-related abilities share common mechanisms, such as pitch perception. More extensive research on how musical aptitude and reading are related is needed. Information about the underlying mechanisms in them could be used to create music interventions to support reading acquisition