Does Musical Melodic Intelligence enhance the perception of mandarin lexical tones?

In tonal languages, as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tones. Previous studies suggest that lexical tone is processed as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information. Mandarin Chinese, for non-tonal language speakers, has the addi-tional difficulty of the presence of lexical tones. The fact that lexical tones are both linguistic and tonal, leads to wonder if a great ability of discriminating relative pitch variations in a musical context can enhance the perceptual discrimination of lexical tones. This study aims at verifying if the discrimination of lexical mandarin tones varies in function of melodic ability. 46 students with no previous experience of Mandarin or any other tonal language were tested for their melodic memory by means of subtest 3 (Me