Does musical training influence perceptual learning of Japanese pitch accent? The case of native Italian speakers

This ongoing research aims primarily at exploring whether musical training has any influence on the perceptual learning of Japanese lexical pitch accent by Italian native speakers with no prior experience of Japanese. A high variability phonetic training (HVPT) experiment on learning of the Japanese pitch accent by Italian native speakers was implemented. Two categories of participants (musicians and non-musicians) were recruited. Musicians and non-musicians were assigned randomly to one of two training conditions: high variability (HV) training or low variability (LV) training. Musicians also engaged in the absolute pitch test. The experiment was carried out entirely online. The preliminary results are that overall, the Italian musicians outperformed the Italian non-musicians in all tests of Japanese pitch accent identification. The performance differences between the Italian musicians and non-musicians increased after training. As for the absolute pitch test, none of the musicians had absolute pitch. The preliminary results show, surprisingly, that the HV training was more effective for the Italian non-musicians than the LV training was. By contrast, both training conditions seemed to be effective for the Italian musicians.