Instrumental music training relates to intensity assessment but not emotional prosody recognition in Mandarin

Abstract

Building on research demonstrating the benefits of music training for emotional prosody recognition in nontonal languages, this study delves into its unexplored influence on tonal languages. In tonal languages, the acoustic similarity between lexical tones and music, along with the dual role of pitch in conveying lexical and affective meanings, create a unique interplay. We evaluated 72 participants, half of whom had extensive instrumental music training, with the other half serving as demographically matched controls. All participants completed an online test consisting of 210 Chinese pseudosentences, each designed to express one of five emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, or neutrality. Our robust statistical analyses, which included effect size estimates and Bayesian factors, revealed that music and nonmusic groups exhibit similar abilities in identifying the emotional prosody of various emotions. However, the music group attributed higher intensity ratings to emotional prosodies of happiness, fear, and anger compared to the nonmusic group. These findings suggest that while instrumental music training is not related to emotional prosody recognition, it does appear to be related to perceived emotional intensity. This dissociation between emotion recognition and intensity evaluation adds a new piece to the puzzle of the complex relationship between music training and emotion perception in tonal languages.