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Language and music exist in all human societies. They are critical in human lifeand both of them involve processing of complex and meaningful sound sequences(Patel, 2008:3). People’s interest in the comparison of language and music has a longhistory too. Many historical figures, including Plato, Darwin, Wittgenstein, andBernstein have made their contribution to the contemplation of and speculation aboutthe relation between language and music up to the dawn of modern cognitive science,when empirical research using new concepts and tools start to replace formersuggestions and analogies (Patel, 2008:4).As language and music are extremely complex subjects, it is natural that linguistsand scientists using different tools or studying from different perspectives may notalways have unanimous viewpoints on a certain problem. For example, there aregenerally three kinds of viewpoints on the processing mechanisms of language a ndmusic among researchers (Mantell and Pfordresher, 2013). Some have argued forshared processing (Koelsch, 2011; Patel, 2008; Sammler et al., 2009 etc.: see Section1.2), some have argued for separate cognitive modules (Peretz & Coltheart, 2003;Peretz & Hyde, 2003 etc.: see Section 1.3), and some have emphasized a cautiousstand on drawing strong connections (Jackendoff & Lerdahl, 2006; Jackendoff, 2009etc.: see Section 1.4). As the topic of this thesis is fundamentally about the relationbetween musical pitch processing abilities and foreign language intonation imitatingability, it is necessary that we start with an introduction to the three viewpointsmentioned above, as well as research findings pertaining to the relation betweenlanguage and music.between language and music” (Section 1.2.2), which support “shared processing oflanguage and music” (Patel, 2008). Section 1.3 introduces the opposite viewpoint thatargues for the existence of two distinct processing modules for speech and music. Italso reports the latest study (Mantell and Pfordresher, 2013) carried out to investigatewhether pitch processing is domain specific as proposed by Peretz and Coltheart(2003). Section 1.4 introduces a “thirty party” perspective (Jackendoff, 2009) to lookat the problem, emphasizing the importance of a cautious stand on drawing strongconnections between the two domains. In section 1.5, I will present a summary ofwhat has been discussed in this chapter as the theoretical basis of the current study..

1.2 Shared Processing of Language and Music

Music and Early Language AcquisitionNewborn infants have an excellent ability to discriminate phonemes of alllanguages; this is evident from their sensitivity to timbre (Werker & Tees, 1984;Brandt et al., 2012). In addition, they are also sensitive to the rhythmic characteristicsof language and able to distinguish between languages on the basis of thosecharacteristics even when their native language is not included in the contrast (Nazziet al., 1998). Infants even show sensitivity to characteristic prosody, or melody in thefirst few days of life (Friederici, 2006; Cheng et al., 2012). Between 6 to 12 months,infants gradually develop a perceptual bias to their native language and to music. Atabout 9 months, infants understand their first word, which indicates the gradualtaking-over of semantic and syntactic dev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。