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elopment, as well as the beginning oftalking between 11 and 13 months (Friederici, 2006; Brandt et al., 2012). Between 18and 24 months, normally developing infants experience a spurt of vocabulary growth,accompanied by a high point of syntactic learning before 3 years old (Brandt et al.,2012; Kuhl, 2010). It seems that infants, at the very beginning, have been listening tolanguage with “a musical ear”, using the musical aspects of language (rhythm, timbre,pitch contour) as a “scaffolding” for the development of their languagecomprehension (Brandt et al., 2012).

Chapter 2 A Review of Previous Studies ........................10

2.1 Participants in Previous Studies .....................10

2.2 The Operational Definition in Previous Studies .....................11

2.3 Tests for Musical Abilities in Previous Studies..........................12

2.3.1 Standardized Receptive Tests for Musical Aptitude...............................12

2.3.2 Self-designed Productive Tests for Musical Aptitude ............................14

2.4 Tests for Language Abilities in Previous Studies..............................................15

3.1 Research Questions.................................22

3.2 Participants ................................23

3.3 Apparatus..............................24

3.4 The Pitch Processing Experiments.......................25

Chapter 4 Data Analysis and Results

4.1 Initial Processing of Collected Recordings

As the data of the production tasks were collected with a digital voice recorder,some initial processing of the recordings was necessary before embarking on theanalysis of the performance of the participants.The first step in this process was to cut and edit the target stimuli and imitationrecordings with meticulous care. Special attention was needed for the initialconsonants in both the stimuli and the imitations. These onsets (e.g. the [s] sound in“so… what are we?”) does not produce an F0 contour in an utterance but still has asignificant influence on the timing of subsequent syllables and reflects the quality ofimitation. Therefore such consonants should not be left out of consideration.After cutting out the target stimuli in this way, the pitch data were convertedfrom Hz to “Semitone re 100 Hz” in the Praat software and templates which wouldlater be used for comparing the stimuli and imitations were made. These templateswere Excel files in which the duration and semitone values of each stimulus(extracted every 1/100 second with Praat) were listed. The virtue of making suchtemplates was that we only extracted the duration and F0 information of each targetonce and the templates could be reused in the analyses of all participants, which bothsaved time and avoided errors in repeated extraction. For an example of a template ofone stimulus, see Appendix B.

4.2 Results of the Pitch Perception Tests and the Pitch Production

TestIn this part, the results of the two pitch perception tests are reported. Forconvenience, the participants will henceforth be referred to by the initial letters oftheir names in capitals.intonation imitating performance respectively in the analyses below.

Chapter 5 Conclusion

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