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The correlation coefficients of the F0 contours between imitations and targetstimuli (in which two significantly different foreign languages were involved)reflected heterogeneous intonation imitating abilities among the participants.By means of investigating the correlation between their intonation imitatingperformance on each foreign language with their pitch processing abilities, we havefound that participants with better pitch processing abilities tend to show betteroverall intonation imitating performance not only on a familiar foreign language(English), but also on an unfamiliar one (Thai). Among the three different pitchprocessing abilities, the ability to detect pitch direction (of fine-grained pitch contrastcomprised of two discrete notes) is found to be significantly correlated with neitherimitation of English, nor of Thai, at least for the stimuli used in the current study. Theability to detect pitch changes is found to be significantly correlated with performanceon Thai. The ability to produce pitch precisely is found to be significantly correlatedwith imitation of English intonation, but only marginally correlated with that of Thai.An investigation into the correlation between different trials of each languageand the pitch processing abilities further shows that participants with betterpitch-change detection ability may have a specific advantage over others with respectto imitating the intonation of Thai, the unfamiliar one of the two foreign languages.Although they do not tend to show better performance in trial 1s, they show betteroverall performance in trial 4s when imitating Thai. Pitch production ability is foundto be significantly correlated with trial 1s of English intonation imitation, and thecorrelation becomes more significant in trial 4s, which means that participants withbetter pitch production ability tend to imitate better than others at the first trials andretain their advantage after three repetitions within a short period of time. On thecontrary, for Thai, the correlation decrease from marginally significant in trial 1s toonly approaching significance in trial 4s, which means that the advantage is not sosalient at the beginning and tends to fade after repetitions. Thus, we discover that theability to detect pitch changes seems more inclined to facilitate intonation imitation inan unfamiliar foreign language like Thai, while the ability to produce pitch sequencesprecisely seems more inclined to facilitate intonation imitation in a familiar one, suchas English.A subsequent exploration into the correlation between cross-trial improvementfor each language and the pitch processing abilities shows that participants with betterpitch production ability tend to show less improvement in their Thai intonation, whichseems a little bit strange. Our tentative explanation for this phenomenon is that theyare more subject to fatigue effects, which needs to be further tested in future studies.

5.2 Limitations, and Suggestions for Future Work

Although the current study add to the evidence in support of the positivecorrelation between musical pitch processing abilities and the ability to imitateEnglish intonation, and innovatively explored the correlation with regard to anunfamiliar foreign language, it was still a rather preliminary one. The limitationsincluded but were not limited to the following aspects:First, the pitch production task, and foreign language imitatio本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。