Hmong Music and Language Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Investigation
Author(s):
Poss, Nicholas Frederick
Format:
Thesis
Degree granted:
Ph.D.
Publisher:
Ann Arbor : The Ohio State University, 2012.
Pages:
136
Language:
English
Abstract:
Speech surrogacy, which includes the performance of verbal messages on musical instruments, is found in a variety of cultures. The developing field of music and language cognition can benefit from the study of these communicative forms, which confound our expectations of the boundaries between speech and music. Previous studies have focused on semiotic relationships of similarity between musical sound and speech. While this type of analysis can suggest strategies for decoding messages, it cannot explain how listeners make use of this information. Using methodology derived from psycholinguistics, this dissertation investigates speech surrogate cognition from the perspective of Hmong culture to find out how listeners understand verbal messages encoded in performances on aerophones called raj. In one experiment, musical phrases of varying lengths were presented to skilled listeners to investigate the strategies used in understanding performances. The results show that listeners are highly successful at identifying phrases. For ambiguous words, listeners relied mainly on the established relationships between musical pitch and lexical tone to infer meaning rather than broad distinctions between types of syllable onsets. This demonstrates a problem with the semiotic approach to analyzing speech surrogates: listeners do not necessarily make use of everything encoded in the signal. Finally, there were different response patterns for phrases of different lengths, indicating that the context of messages affects how listeners interpret them. The second experiment looked at the effect of individual pitches on lexical selection to see if instrumental sounds might speed access to relevant lexical items. An auditory priming paradigm was used in which subjects had to repeat words and pseudowords in the Hmong language. These target items were primed by musical sounds and pitch contours derived from spoken words. The primes either matched or mismatched the targets and were compared against white noise in the envelope filter of a spoken syllable to examine the effect on reaction time. It was hypothesized that words primed by matched musical sounds and pitch contours would be repeated more quickly than words primed by mismatched sounds if the relationship of similarity acted upon the mental lexicon. The results showed no effect for matched or mismatched primes but did show an effect for primes containing pitch content versus the control. Pitched primes speeded reaction times to both words and pseudowords, suggesting that the effect is not related to lexical processing. It is possible that the pitched sounds primed areas of the pre-motor cortex, which is involved on planning movements of the vocal tract, resulting in a faster response. This effect was also found in subsequent experiments with speakers of another tonal language (Mandarin) who do not practice speech surrogacy. This research demonstrates the benefit of interdisciplinary research that includes an ethnographic approach. Music and speech are not so neatly categorized in many cultures and by studying phenomena on this border we will better understand not only speech surrogate cognition, but also the role of pitch in language cognition as well as the effect of personal experience on cognition.