Abstract

Pitch is typically regarded in terms of music, but it is also used to convey urgency in alarm signals, emotions in speech, and meaning in tonal languages such as Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai. Performance on tasks involving pitch has been shown to be affected by musical experience, tonal language experience, response scale, and practice. In the present study, scores on a relative pitch task were used to explore the relationship between musical experience (musician vs. non-musician) and tone language (tonal vs. non-tonal) and examine the effects of response scale (discrete vs. slider) and practice (Day 1 vs. Day 2) on relative pitch performance. Participants judged the direction and distance of comparison tones relative to a standard and given scores based on the percentage of correct responses and a Cochran-Weiss-Shanteau (CWS) score based on a ratio of discrimination over consistency. Participants also completed the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), an existing measure that tests different components of pitch processing.

Musicians outperformed non-musicians on the MBEA and relative pitch task using the CWS and the percentage of correct responses as performance measures. 1 Tonal language speakers did better than non-tonal language speakers on four of six MBEA subscales. Overall, participants' relative pitch performance improved from Day 1 to Day 2, but tonal language speakers showed a greater amount of improvement on Day 2. This tonal language experience x practice interaction was revealed using the CWS, but not the percentage of correct responses. The CWS also revealed that musicians scored significantly higher using the discrete compared to the slider scale, while the percentage of correct responses did not. The CWS was positively correlated with the percentage of correct responses and the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), two known measures of pitch processing and appears to be a more sensitive measure than the percentage of correct responses in measuring relative pitch performance.