a) The purpose of the research
 Investigate whether musical training enhances native Mandarin speakers’ ability to recognise emotions in speech
b) The research question
Whether musical training affects the perceptual ability of Mandarin speakers to distinguish different emotions in speech
c) The method
Having participants recruited and requested to finish emotion recognition task, which consists of 224 Mandarin pseudo-sentences, and they were asked to identify each emotion behind each utterance after listening to the sentence.
d) The type of research data gathered
Information on each individual participant about their backgrounds and their responses to each individual question.
e) Data processing steps
The correct responses were labelled as 1, otherwise 0. The non-relevant information columns were removed as they were not needed for analysis, those questions were asked only because to hide the true intent of the background questionnaire.
For the exploratory research, the participants were seperated into two groups: musician and non-musician, based on their background.
f) The type of analyses conducted
Data analysis done using R, the main analysis was done using linear model (glmer) with years of musicianship as a factor, so was the first exploratory research but with whether being a musician as a factor. Then a MANOVA test, linear model, and canonical analysis for the rest of the exploratory research which focused on the acoustic characteristics of the stimuli (pseudo-sentences).