Music perception influences plosive perception in Wu dialects

Wu is a dialect group of the Chinese branch of SinoTibetan languages. Wu dialects are known for having plain, aspirated as well as voiced stops. Crucially, voiced plosives always co-occur with low-register tones. We investigated the perception of voicing distinction among phonetically and phonologically trained Wu native speakers by superimposing different tones on syllables starting with originally plain, aspirated, and voiced stops. The results show that recognition of the voicing contrast turned out to be largely inaccurate, and the subjects mostly relied on lexical tone rather than on phonation itself. Subsequently, we examined the perception of music improved the recognition of the phonation distinction. Although the perception of the voicing distinction did not become more accurate, it turned out that listening to musical fragment in between the language fragments led to a different classification of the lexical tones. This, in turn, led to a different perception of the plosives.