Effects of musical ear training on lexical tone perception

Abstract

The effect of short term musical experience on lexical tone perception was examined by administering four hours of daily musical ear training to non-tone language speakers. After training, participants showed some improvement in a tone labeling task, but not a tone discrimination task; however, this improvement did not differ reliably from controls indicating that short-term musical training is thus far not able to replicate language effects observed among lifelong musicians, but some linguistic differences between musicians and nonmusicians may likely be due to experience, rather than individual differences or other factors.