Towards a Native OPERA Hypothesis: Musicianship and English Stress Perception

Abstract

Musical experience facilitates speech perception. French musicians, to whom stress is foreign, have been found to perceive English stress more accurately than French non-musicians. This study investigated whether this musical advantage also applies to native listeners. English musicians and non-musicians completed an English stress discrimination task and two control tasks. With age, non-verbal intelligence and short-term memory controlled, the musicians exhibited a perceptual advantage relative to the non-musicians. This perceptual advantage was equally potent to both trochaic and iambic stress patterns. In terms of perceptual strategy, the two groups showed differential use of acoustic cues for iambic but not trochaic stress. Collectively, the results could be taken to suggest that musical experience enhances stress discrimination even among native listeners. Remarkably, this musical advantage is highly consistent and does not particularly favour either stress pattern. For iambic stress, the musical advantage appears to stem from the differential use of acoustic cues by musicians. For trochaic stress, the musical advantage may be rooted in enhanced durational sensitivity.

Musicianship Influences Language Effect on Musical Pitch Perception

“…In a follow-up paper on refining the OPERA hypothesis, Patel (2012) raised the possibility that the OPERA hypothesis might apply to rhythmic perception. For music-to-language transfer, there was behavioral and neural evidence of enhanced speech rhythm sensitivity among musicians (Marie et al, 2011;Cason et al, 2015;Magne et al, 2016;Choi, 2021b). This suggested that the OPERA hypothesis also applied to rhythmic perception, at least unidirectionally (i.e., music-to-language).…”

“…Based on the pre-established criteria, musicians were individuals who (a) had received 7 or more years of continuous music training and (b) could play at least one music instrument (Choi, 2020(Choi, , 2021b. Non-musicians were individuals who (c) had never received more than 2 years of music training, (d) had not received any music training in the past 5 years, and (e) could not play any music instrument.…”

“…An automatic procedure ensured that the participants were using a computer but not phones or tablets. After giving written consent, the participants filled out a language and music background questionnaire (Choi et al, 2017(Choi et al, , 2019Choi, 2021b). Prior to the Musical Ear Test, the participants could test and adjust the sound volume to their satisfaction (Wallentin et al, 2010).…”

The choice of musical instrument matters: Effect of pitched but not unpitched musicianship on tone identification and word learning

“…The participants were sorted into three groups, that is, pitched musician (n = 15), unpitched musician (n = 13), and non-musician (n = 15). Adopting pre-established criteria in previous studies (Choi, 2021(Choi, , 2022b(Choi, , 2022cCooper & Wang, 2012) non-musicians. On average, the pitched musicians and the unpitched musicians had received 11.77 years (SD = 3.87 years) and 10.81 years (SD = 3.68 years) of music training, respectively, while three non-musicians had only received 1 year (SD = 0 year) of music training.…”

Enduring musician advantage among former musicians in prosodic pitch perception

“…More recently, Toh et al 20 found that even among speakers of a tone language, those who have received musical training outperform non-musicians in non-native lexical tone perception. Apart from lexical tone perception, studies have found that among individuals with no tone language experience, musicians are better than non-musicians at perceiving stress, which is indicated by a combination of pitch, duration, and intensity variations 21 , 22 . However, it remains unclear whether the musician advantage in stress perception also applies to tone language speakers.…”