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Previous research has indicated that musicians and bilinguals demonstrate potential cognitive benefits due to their long-term experience with music and two or more languages, respectively. For the present study, such a benefit is examined in the context of auditory inhibitory control. An auditory version of the Stroop task involving pitch and language (as used by Bialystok & DePape, 2009) was used and expanded upon. Separate groups of monolinguals, monolingual musicians, bilinguals, and tone-language bilinguals were established to investigate not only musical and bilingual experience in general, but also to determine if there is an effect of type of language on auditory inhibitory control. Additionally, a contour-based auditory Stroop task (with rising and falling tone patterns) was implemented to investigate a different dimension of auditory perception. Differences in reaction time were measured as indicators of inhibitory control. The results suggest an advantage for monolingual musicians, while a possible language effect may be detrimental to performance for bilinguals on language-based tasks. The results indicate possible shared underlying cognitive resources given the apparent transferable auditory processing benefits for musicians. The implications of these results are discussed, and future directions are proposed to address factors such as age, behavioral vs. physiological effects, and whether the performance of bilinguals is due to the nature of being bilingual, or taking the task in a non-native language.

A complex tone composed of only higher-order harmonics typically elicits a pitch percept equivalent to the tone's missing fundamental frequency (f0). When judging the direction of residue pitch change between two such tones, however, listeners may have completely opposite perceptual experiences depending on whether they are biased to perceive changes based on the overall spectrum or the missing f0 (harmonic spacing). Individual differences in residue pitch change judgments are reliable and have been associated with musical experience and functional neuroanatomy. Tone languages put greater pitch processing demands on their speakers than non-tone languages, and we investigated whether these lifelong differences in linguistic pitch processing affect listeners' bias for residue pitch. We asked native tone language speakers and native English speakers to perform a pitch judgment task for two tones with missing fundamental frequencies. Given tone pairs with ambiguous pitch changes, listeners were asked to judge the direction of pitch change, where the direction of their response indicated whether they attended to the overall spectrum (exhibiting a spectral bias) or the missing f0 (exhibiting a fundamental bias). We found that tone language speakers are significantly more likely to perceive pitch changes based on the missing f0 than English speakers. These results suggest that tone-language speakers' privileged experience with linguistic pitch fundamentally tunes their basic auditory processing.

We argue that the standard focus theories reach their limits when confronted with the focus systems of the Chadic languages. The backbone of the standard focus theories consists of two assumptions, both called into question by the languages under consideration. Firstly, it is standardly assumed that focus is generally marked by stress. The Chadic languages, however, exhibit a variety of different devices for focus marking. Secondly, it is assumed that focus is always marked. In Tangale, at least, focus is not marked consistently on all types of constituents. The paper offers two possible solutions to this dilemma.

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