Musical training is associated with better perception of lexical tones and pure tones: Mandarin listeners’ perception of non-native Cantonese tones

This study examines whether musical training in Mandarin listeners is associated with enhanced assimilation and discrimination of non-native Cantonese lexical tones (six tones; four contrasts), as well as improved pure tone pitch discrimination. Forty native Mandarin listeners (20 musicians, 20 non-musicians) completed a tone assimilation task (Experiment 1), two Cantonese tone discrimination tasks with constant versus variable vowel contexts (Experiments 2a and 2b), and a pitch discrimination task targeting static and dynamic pure-tone contrasts (Experiment 3). Experiment 1 replicated established tone-mapping patterns, confirming that Mandarin-Cantonese mappings are shaped by phonetic and phonological similarity. Discrimination performance across tone contrasts was likewise broadly consistent with the predictions for relative discriminability under the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM), and its extension to suprasegmentals (PAM-S). Musicians consistently showed higher accuracy than non-musicians in both Cantonese tone discrimination and pure tone discrimination. Overall, the findings suggest that musical experience is associated with enhanced sensitivity to pitch differences across linguistic and non-linguistic domains, supporting the contribution of domain-general auditory mechanisms to non-native tone perception.