Question or tone 2? How language experience and linguistic function guide pitch processing

How does language experience shape pitch processing? Do speakers of tone languages, which use pitch to signal lexical contrasts (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) attend to pitch movements more closely than speakers of intonation languages (e.g., Dutch)? Contradictory findings have been reported in the literature. In the current study, we hypothesize that listeners should be particularly attentive to any pitch information that signals meaningful information in the native language. This includes pitch movements signaling lexical contrasts (present in tone languages only) as well as postlexical contrasts (present in all languages). Both Mandarin and Dutch listeners performed speeded ABX match to sample tasks on the same sets of nonsense words. As predicted, the same pitch movements were attended to differentially by the two language populations depending on the role that information played in the native language. Mandarin listeners were more attentive than Dutch listeners to pitch movements as these signaled potential lexical contrasts in Mandarin (but not Dutch). Importantly, Dutch listeners were more attentive to pitch movements signaling postlexical information than to pitch movements signaling no meaningful linguistic information. These findings underscore the importance of postlexical information in online speech processing and explain apparent contradictions in the literature.

► Chinese and Dutch listeners were tested in a speeded ABX nonword classification task.
► Response speed and type show language background shapes attention to speech pitch.
► In general, Chinese listeners attend to tonal movements more than Dutch listeners.
► Dutch listeners attend more to postlexical than non-linguistic pitch contrasts.
► Our results reveal a three way split in listeners' attention to pitch information.