The Influence of Individuals’ Musical Training and Pragmatic Skills on the Perception of f0 Manipulation in a Foreign Language

Abstract

In speech perception studies, particularly of intonation, several factors have previously been noticed to influence one’s perceptive skills and, accordingly, their ability to perceive smaller changes in intonation. While sociodemographic factors like gender and age have often been studied in this context, other factors like musical training and individual differences, particularly individual pragmatic skills, are gradually becoming more interesting for those studying speech perception. Playing an instrument is argued to involve many highly complex cognitive functions and affect neuroplasticity and importantly, it has been studied in connection with auditory processing. Furthermore, the study of the influence of individual skills on auditory processing shows a positive relation between higher pragmatic skills and perception. While both of these factors are proven significant, the research tends to focus on one of them, rarely comparing the two skills or examining which one has a higher influence on the perception of intonation. The present study addresses this gap by examining Croatian native speakers’ perception of f0 stimulation in Catalan, a language they are unfamiliar with. 91 participants took a discrimination test in which they listened to 20 pairs of stimuli and had to answer whether the stimuli in each pair were the same. The analysis was done in two steps, first, through a confusion matrix and analysis of answers for each pair of stimuli, and second, by building three linear regression models in order to compare the relationship between musical training and pragmatic skills and the correct answers. The results demonstrate a good overall precision, but lower recall score and establish the fourth pair of stimuli as a threshold in which the majority of participants observe the difference between the stimuli. The second model, which included musical training, but no pragmatic skills as a variable, has proven to be the best-performing one, showing that in this study musical training played a more significant role than pragmatic skills in individuals’ ability to perceive changes of f0 in an unfamiliar language.