A Programmatic Stage 1 Registered Report of global song-speech relationships replicating and extending Ozaki et al. (2024) and Savage et al. (2025)

How cross-culturally consistent and general are relationships between song and speech? Ozaki et al. (2024) analysed singing and speaking from their 75 coauthors speaking 55 languages, concluding that songs are “slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech”. However, the degree to which their findings would generalise to other speakers of their languages remains unclear. We will test the replicability of Ozaki et al.’s findings using matched singing and conversational speech audio recordings from 15-30 participants per language in 26 sites around the world (collected as part of a broader study of global song/speech relationships [Savage et al., In Principle Accepted]). Using Peer Community In Registered Reports (PCI-RR)’s “Programmatic” track will allow us to replicate and extend Ozaki et al.’s original findings in a rigorous and equitable manner by allowing each local research team to lead its own separate first-authored Stage 2 Registered Report based on a single shared Stage 1 protocol. This will allow us to test the replicability of Ozaki et al.’s original findings across diverse languages while also giving each team the flexibility to pursue their own exploratory analyses in directions most relevant to their local context. Regardless of results, our multi-site large-scale replications will enhance our understanding of cross-cultural relationships between music and language and provide a template for equitable global collaboration using PCI-RR’s Programmatic track.