The OPERA hypothesis theorizes how musical experience heightens perceptual acuity to lexical tones. One missing element in the hypothesis is whether musical advantage is general to all or specific to some lexical tones. To further extend the hypothesis, this study investigated whether English musicians consistently outperformed English nonmusicians in perceiving a variety of Cantonese tones. In an AXB discrimination task, the musicians exhibited superior discriminatory performance over the nonmusicians only in the high level, high rising, and mid-level tone contexts. Similarly, in a Cantonese tone sequence recall task, the musicians significantly outperformed the nonmusicians only in the contour tone context but not in the level tone context. Collectively, the results reflect the selectivity of musical advantage—musical experience is only advantageous to the perception of some but not all Cantonese tones, and elements of selectivity can be introduced to the OPERA hypothesis. Methodologically, the findings highlight the need to include a wide variety of lexical tone contrasts when studying music-to-language transfer.

中文翻译：

---

音乐优势的选择性

OPERA 假设理论化了音乐体验如何提高对词汇音调的感知敏锐度。假设中缺少的一个元素是音乐优势是对所有人普遍还是对某些词汇音调是特定的。为了进一步扩展这一假设，本研究调查了英国音乐家在感知各种粤语声调方面是否始终优于英国非音乐家。在 AXB 辨别任务中，音乐家仅在高音、高音和中等音调环境中表现出优于非音乐家的辨别能力。同样，在粤语音调序列回忆任务中，音乐家仅在轮廓音调上下文中显着优于非音乐家，但在水平音调上下文中没有。集体，结果反映了音乐优势的选择性——音乐经验仅对感知部分而非全部粤语声调有利，选择性的元素可以引入OPERA假设。在方法论上，研究结果强调了在研究音乐到语言的迁移时需要包括各种各样的词汇音调对比。