Research

Does being an expert in music (e.g., a trained musician) mean that they are able to perceive or learn a different language more easily? Similarly, does being a tone language speaker (i.e., a speaker that uses pitch to distinguish meanings) mean that they are better able to perceive and learn music?

My research has shown that this so-called 'cross-domain transfer' effect is common [see, for example: here, here, here]. However, it does have its limits. For example, extensive pitch experience does afford one with better pitch perception even for the other domain, but it may not necessarily translate to better pitch learning [paper]. Similarly, musicians may be better able to perceive difficult lexical tone pairs than their non-musician counterparts, but they perform similarly in their production [paper]. 

Different languages have different phonological categories. For example, in English /r/ and /l/ are two different phonemes, whereas in Japanese there is only the Japanese /r/. Similarly, different musical cultures use different musical scales and therefore different musical pitches. How, then, do we learn the relevant (phonological and musical) categories in our environment?

Some studies suggest that this can be done simply by listening and keeping track of how often particular sound occurs in our environment (a process we call 'distributional learning'). That is, we learn by inferring the underlying structure/categories based on the assumption that the more frequent a particular sound occurs, the more likely that sound is relevant. My work has found that this is indeed the case with lexical tones [paper] and musical pitch [paper], and thus it appears that the building blocks of spoken language and music can be acquired using a common learning mechanism. 

My Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship project focuses on emotion recognition. Specifically, I ask why are some emotions more difficult to recognise than others, and why do some individuals (such as autistic individuals) have more difficulties recognising emotions than others? 

My working hypothesis to both questions relate to how variable the emotions are expressed across different individuals, which in turn, affect how reliable the cues are in signalling the emotion. I suggest that part of the difficulty autistic individuals have with emotion recognition is related to the difficulties that they may have with learning and processing the relationship between the unreliable cues and the underlying emotion.