“博雅语言学”讲座第十三讲
题目：Perceiving Pitch in Speech and Music

报告人：王 悦，加拿大西蒙弗雷德大学语言学系教授、
语言与大脑实验室主任
时 间：2017年11月22日【星期三】10:00-12:00
地 点：北京大学中文系【人文学苑】6号楼B124
主持人：北京大学中文系 孔江平教授
报告人简介：
Wang Yue (王悦) is Professor of Linguistics and Director of Language and Brain Lab at Simon Fraser University (SFU), Vancouver, Canada. She graduated from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway) with a BA in English (1993) and an MA in Phonetics (1995). She received her PhD in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Cornell University (2001), and conducted post-doctoral research in the Institute of Language and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. Before starting her position at SFU in 2003, she was Professor of Linguistics and Director of Chinese Program at the University at Buffalo. Wang Yue’s main areas of research are phonetics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and cognitive science. Using behavioral, neural, and computational techniques, she has been studying the processing and acquisition of second-language speech sounds with the goal of learning more about brain plasticity as well as how multisensory brain systems cooperate functionally in cognitive processing. Her work has been published in journals such as Applied Psycholinguistics, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Brain and Language, Brain Imaging and Behavior, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Journal of Phonetics, and Speech Communication. She is currently Associate Editor of Language and Speech, and is on Editorial Board of Journal of Neurolinguistics and Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
内容提要：
Given that music and speech share the use of spectral and temporal acoustic features (e.g., pitch and tempo), it has been posited that experience gained from one domain can be transferred to the other under shared, domain-general processing mechanisms. Subsequent questions involve how musical experience affects linguistic pitch processing such as lexical tone learning in a non-native language, and how musical and linguistic experiences interact. Moreover, if music and language enjoy shared processing mechanisms, we would expect bi-directional transfer of experience from one domain to the other. In this talk, I present behavioral and neurophysiological studies examining the effects of musical and linguistic experience on processing of linguistic tone and musical melodic tone. Our results reveal that musicians’ attunement to spectral information in music positively transfers to the linguistic domain to aid categorization of non-native tonal contrasts. However, musical experience is not advantageous in discriminating within-category variations, which requires listeners to ignore subtle physical differences in order to make categorical judgments. Similarly, linguistic tone experience enhances categorization ability in music but decrease sensitivity to fine-grained pitch variations. These findings demonstrate bi-directional transfer of experience between speech and music. Furthermore, our tone training study shows that pitch experiences from linguistic and musical backgrounds integrate to affect non-native tone word learning, indicating acoustic-phonological-lexical continuity in learning because enhancing listeners’ perception of lower-level tonal information through musical and acoustic training significantly contributed to success in a higher-level linguistic (word learning) task. Together, the neural and behavioral findings inform how brain functions are interconnected across sensory, linguistic and cognitive domains.
主办单位
北京大学中国语言学研究中心