Ruotian (Angela) Weng

Major: Psychology, Minor in Music

Biography: Ruotian Weng (she usually goes by Angela) is an International student born and raised in China. She came to United States in 2019 as a freshman and discovered her strong interests in psychology. She is also minoring in music, does cover singing and has a unique interest in cooking and baking. Angela plans to pursue in the field of psychology related scientific research after she graduate, and eventually become a psychologist.

Research Title: The Effect of Tonal Language Speaking on Pitch Discrimination Ability

Faculty Mentor: Mark Mattson, Department of Psychology

Abstract: Contour, the trajectory of frequency changes, has been used to study music and language perception comparatively. Although language contour cues exist in several attributes, the lexical tone is considered unique because it conveys meanings. Accurately recognizing pitch changes in tonal languages become important to tonal language speakers, suggesting a possible enhanced sensibility to pitch changes. Recent studies focusing on transferrable properties ("transfer effect") between language and music reported incoherent results on whether tonal language speaking can facilitate precision on pitch discrimination, especially when it comes to non-language related pitch discrimination tasks. This study is interested in whether facilitations can be seen among tonal language speakers and whether facilitations (if any) can be generalized into non-language related pitch discrimination ability. Therefore, we asked participants to perform computer-programmed pitch discrimination tasks remotely. Participants were presented with sets of two tones and asked whether the second tone (ranging from 426 Hz-464 Hz) was "higher," "lower," or "the same" than the first tone (440 Hz) as fast as possible. We recruited both musicians (N= 7) and non-musicians (N=43) who speak English (zero tones; N=14), Igbo (three tones; N=9), Mandarin (four tones; N=13), Thai (five tones; N=7) or Vietnamese (six tones; N=4) to test out whether the number of tones in different languages will impact discrimination performances on the task. Based on current collected data, the results suggested no significant differences (p>.05) between English speakers and all other tonal language speakers on pitch discrimination ability, nor did the number of tones impact performances. Data collection will be completed at April 9th, 2023.