The relation between musical abilities and speech prosody perception: A meta-analysis

Prosodic discrimination skills mediate the association between musical aptitude and vocal emotion recognition ability

“…This suggests that the observed benefits of musical ability are primarily due to increased auditory sensitivity, rather than advantages in cognitive abilities, such as inferring emotion from emotional cues 8 . Consistent with this view, previous research has highlighted a link between musical ability and improved perception of prosodic signals in speech 9 .…”

“…In addition, experimental studies have demonstrated that musicians have an heightened ability to detect pitch and timbre changes in both music and speech 26 , 27 and advantages in speech-in-noise recognition 28 . Overall, two recent meta-analyses showed a small positive effect of musical training on auditory processing 29 , and a medium positive effect on linguistic and emotional speech prosody perception 9 . Given the importance of sensory processing in vocal emotion recognition 8 , 30 , these findings are particularly relevant, as evidenced by the fact that individuals with hearing loss have difficulty associating auditory cues with emotions 31 .…”

Is musical ability related to second-language acquisition? A meta-analysis.

“…One idea, supported by a growing body of research, is that successful second-language acquisition is related to musical ability. This follows from broader links between musical and linguistic processing in the native language (for reviews, see e.g., Patel, 2008;Slevc, 2012), including evidence that individual differences in grammatical ability and speech processing are related to musical ability (e.g., Gordon et al, 2015;Jansen et al, 2023;Lee et al, 2020;Nayak et al, 2022). For example, musical ability predicts the distinctiveness of neural responses to closely related speech sounds (Parbery-Clark et al, 2012), speech discrimination performance (Swaminathan & Schellenberg, 2020), and sensitivity to prosody (Jansen et al, 2023;Morrill et al, 2015).…”

“…This follows from broader links between musical and linguistic processing in the native language (for reviews, see e.g., Patel, 2008;Slevc, 2012), including evidence that individual differences in grammatical ability and speech processing are related to musical ability (e.g., Gordon et al, 2015;Jansen et al, 2023;Lee et al, 2020;Nayak et al, 2022). For example, musical ability predicts the distinctiveness of neural responses to closely related speech sounds (Parbery-Clark et al, 2012), speech discrimination performance (Swaminathan & Schellenberg, 2020), and sensitivity to prosody (Jansen et al, 2023;Morrill et al, 2015). One framework to understand these types of musiclanguage relationships is Patel's (2014) OPERA hypothesis, according to which musical training promotes structural and functional changes in important auditory processing networks (cf.…”

“…It is less clear, however, if this relationship extends to second-language learning. Some evidence suggests musical ability and musical training predicts aspects of second-language proficiency, including perception and production of secondlanguage phonology (Slevc & Miyake, 2006), perception of second-language prosody (see Jansen et al, 2023, for a meta-analysis), lexical tone discrimination (Cooper et al, 2017: Cooper & Wang, 2012, and speech segmentation (Gottfried et al, 2004;Lee & Hung, 2008). However, other evidence suggests that musical ability or training is unrelated to second-language learning (e.g., Boll-Avetisyan et al 2016;Ning et al, 2015).…”