ORCID Profile
0000-0003-1503-8311
Current Organisation
Nottingham Trent University
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Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 20-03-2018
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 29-08-2023
DOI: 10.1007/S10803-023-06075-7
Abstract: Previous studies reported mixed findings on autistic in iduals’ pitch perception relative to neurotypical (NT) in iduals. We investigated whether this may be partly due to in idual differences in cognitive abilities by comparing their performance on various pitch perception tasks on a large s le ( n = 164) of autistic and NT children and adults. Our findings revealed that: (i) autistic in iduals either showed similar or worse performance than NT in iduals on the pitch tasks (ii) cognitive abilities were associated with some pitch task performance and (iii) cognitive abilities modulated the relationship between autism diagnosis and pitch perception on some tasks. Our findings highlight the importance of taking an in idual differences approach to understand the strengths and weaknesses of pitch processing in autism.
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 08-08-2016
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 27-04-2022
Abstract: As many distributional learning (DL) studies have shown, adult listeners can achieve discrimination of a difficult non-native contrast after a short repetitive exposure to tokens falling at the extremes of that contrast. Such studies have shown using behavioural methods that a short distributional training can induce perceptual learning of vowel and consonant contrasts. However, much less is known about the neurological correlates of DL, and few studies have examined non-native lexical tone contrasts. Here, Australian-English speakers underwent DL training on a Mandarin tone contrast using behavioural (discrimination, identification) and neural (oddball-EEG) tasks, with listeners hearing either a bimodal or a unimodal distribution. Behavioural results show that listeners learned to discriminate tones after both unimodal and bimodal training while EEG responses revealed more learning for listeners exposed to the bimodal distribution. Thus, perceptual learning through exposure to brief sound distributions (a) extends to non-native tonal contrasts, and (b) is sensitive to task, phonetic distance, and acoustic cue-weighting. Our findings have implications for models of how auditory and phonetic constraints influence speech learning.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 02-11-2023
Abstract: While anecdotal evidence suggests that music may facilitate verbal memory, empirical evidence for this is less clear. Here, we examined whether learners’ characteristics such as age, working memory (WM), and musical training may influence the effect of music on word learning. Young and older adults learned novel word-referent mappings presented in three music conditions (spoken in the presence of background music, sung in-key, and sung out-of-key) and a control condition (spoken in quiet) and their performance was assessed immediately after learning. We found that whereas age and, to an extent, musical training had a general effect on word learning, WM modulated the effect of music: performance was worse in the music conditions relative to the control condition for learners with lower WM whereas the opposite pattern was observed for those with higher WM. Our results thus highlight the importance of considering in idual characteristics in determining the effect of music on verbal memory.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 22-12-2023
DOI: 10.1177/17470218221135585
Abstract: Face coverings pose difficulties for emotion recognition, but it is unclear whether improvement in recognising emotions from the eyes is possible with experience and whether this might be dependent on one’s autistic traits, given the associations between high autistic traits and poorer emotion perception and reduced gaze to the eye region. In this preregistered study, participants completed a forced-choice emotion recognition task with photographs of eyes and demographic questionnaires that measure their autistic traits and their interaction frequency with others wearing face coverings at two time points: once at the start of the face covering mandate and again 10 months later. We found that after 10 months, in iduals with high autistic traits as a cohort recognised emotions from just the eyes better as a function of their experience with others wearing face coverings, suggesting that emotion perception is malleable even for those who have difficulties with emotion perception.
Publisher: Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
Date: 12-2020
DOI: 10.1121/10.0002776
Abstract: Many studies have reported a musical advantage in perceiving lexical tones among non-native listeners, but it is unclear whether this advantage also applies to native listeners, who are likely to show ceiling-like performance and thus mask any potential musical advantage. The ongoing tone merging phenomenon in Hong Kong Cantonese provides a unique opportunity to investigate this as merging tone pairs are reported to be difficult to differentiate even among native listeners. In the present study, native Cantonese musicians and non-musicians were compared based on discrimination and identification of merging Cantonese tone pairs to determine whether a musical advantage in perception will be observed, and if so, whether this is seen on the phonetic and/or phonological level. The tonal space of the subjects' lexical tone production was also compared. Results indicated that the musicians outperformed the non-musicians on the two perceptual tasks, as indexed by a higher accuracy and faster reaction time, particularly on the most difficult tone pair. In the production task, however, there was no group difference in various indices of tonal space. Taken together, musical experience appears to facilitate native listeners' perception, but not production, of lexical tones, which partially supports a music-to-language transfer effect.
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 10-07-2019
Publisher: Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Date: 27-07-2015
Publisher: American Speech Language Hearing Association
Date: 17-10-2017
DOI: 10.1044/2016_JSLHR-S-16-0080
Abstract: Evidence suggests that extensive experience with lexical tones or musical training provides an advantage in perceiving nonnative lexical tones. This investigation concerns whether such an advantage is evident in learning nonnative lexical tones based on the distributional structure of the input. Using an established protocol, distributional learning of lexical tones was investigated with tone language (Mandarin) listeners with no musical training (Experiment 1) and nontone language (Australian English) listeners with musical training (Experiment 2). Within each experiment, participants were trained on a bimodal (2-peak) or a unimodal (single peak) distribution along a continuum spanning a Thai lexical tone minimal pair. Discrimination performance on the target minimal pair was assessed before and after training. Mandarin nonmusicians exhibited clear distributional learning (listeners in the bimodal, but not those in the unimodal condition, improved significantly as a function of training), whereas Australian English musicians did not (listeners in both the bimodal and unimodal conditions improved as a function of training). Our findings suggest that veridical perception of lexical tones is not sufficient for distributional learning of nonnative lexical tones to occur. Rather, distributional learning appears to be modulated by domain-specific pitch experience and is constrained possibly by top-down interference.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 2017
DOI: 10.1037/XLM0000286
Abstract: Because different musical scales use different sets of intervals and, hence, different musical pitches, how do music listeners learn those that are in their native musical system? One possibility is that musical pitches are acquired in the same way as phonemes, that is, via distributional learning, in which learners infer knowledge from the distributional structure of their input. In this study, we investigate whether novel musical pitch can be acquired distributionally. Nonmusician adults were trained on a continuum spanning a novel musical chord minimal pair (i.e., a novel chord and a mistuned version of that chord) in which the continuum was presented either in a bimodal distribution, with a modal peak at each end of the continuum, or in a unimodal distribution, with a single central modal peak. Discrimination of target minimal pairs was assessed before and after exposure to the distribution. Distributional learning would be said to occur if learners in the bimodal condition, but not those in the unimodal condition, showed evidence of learning, as indexed by improvement in discriminating the minimal pair from pretest to posttest. This indeed was the outcome, suggesting that the building blocks of musical melody-musical pitch-can be acquired using distributional learning. (PsycINFO Database Record
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Jia Hoong Ong.