ISBN 88-7395-155-4 © 2006 ICMPC 1289 Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, August 22-26 2006 Does Musical Melodic Intelligence enhance the perception of mandarin lexical tones? Franco Delogu Dept. of Psychology, University of Rome “La Sapienza” Rome, Italy franco.delogu@uniroma1.it Giulia Lampis Dept. of Oriental Studies , University of Rome “La Sapienza” Rome, Italy Marta Olivetti Belardinelli Dept. of Psychology, University of Rome “La Sapienza” Rome, Italy ECONA ABSTRACT In tonal languages, as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tones. Previous studies suggest that lexical tone is processed as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information. Mandarin Chinese, for non-tonal language speakers, has the addi- tional difficulty of the presence of lexical tones. The fact that lexical tones are both linguistic and tonal, leads to wonder if a great ability of discriminating relative pitch variations in a musical context can enhance the perceptual discrimination of lexical tones. This study aims at verifying if the discrimination of lexical mandarin tones varies in function of melodic ability. 46 students with no previous experience of Mandarin or any other tonal language were tested for their melodic memory by means of subtest 3 (Me- lodic Memory) of Wing’s Standardized Tests of Musical Intelligence and consequently divided in three groups ac- cording to their score (respectively high, medium and low melodic ability groups). Participants were also presented with two short lists of spoken monosyllabic mandarin words and they were invited to perform a same-different task. When the difference occurred, it could either be a different word (phonological condition), or a different tone of one of the words (tonal condition). The task asked to identify the kind of variation occurred (phonological or tonal). Main results show that subjects perform signifi- cantly better in identifying phonological variations rather than tonal ones. More interestingly, the high-Wing group shows a better performance exclusively in detecting tonal variations, while showing no difference from other groups in identifying phonological variations and unchanged lists. Our results lead to infer that the ability to process musical tones can be effectively transferred to a tonal-linguistic domain confirming the strong relation between music and language. Our findings are in agreement with previous studies which demonstrated that music transfer affect is selectively focused on lexical tone processing. Keywords: Lexical tone, L2, Mandarin Chinese, melody, music transfer effect In non tonal languages the role of pitch in verbal com- munication is limited to prosodic aspects working at a su- pra-segmental level. Tone variations inform about the inter- rogative-affirmative nature of the sentence, about emo- tional aspects of the message and many other paralinguistic information. Differently, in Mandarin Chinese, as in other tonal lan- guages, lexical tones provide semantic information about a word. A tone variation can produce a change in the mean- ing of the word (Chao, 1948). In: M. Baroni, A. R. Addessi, R. Caterina, M. Costa (2006) Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition (ICMPC9), Bologna/Italy, August 22-26 2006.©2006 The Society for Music Perception & Cognition (SMPC) and European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM). Copyright of the content of an individual paper is held by the primary (first-named) author of that pa- per. All rights reserved. No paper from this proceedings may be repro- duced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or me- chanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the paper's primary author. No other part of this proceedings may be reproduced or transmit- ted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from SMPC and ESCOM.