Effects of culture on musical pitch perception

How Can We Compare Cochlear Implant Systems across Manufacturers? A Scoping Review of Recent Literature

Electric stimulation via a cochlear implant (CI) enables people with severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss to regain speech understanding and music appreciation and, thus, allow them to actively engage in social life. Three main manufacturers (CochlearTM, MED-ELTM, and Advanced BionicsTM "AB") have been offering CI systems, thus challenging CI recipients and otolaryngologists with a difficult decision as currently no comprehensive overview or meta-analysis on performance outcomes following CI implantation is available. The main goals of this scoping review were to (1) map the literature on speech and music performance outcomes and to (2) find whether studies have performed outcome comparisons between devices of different manufacturers. To this end, a literature search was conducted to find studies that address speech and music outcomes in CI recipients. From a total of 1592 papers, 188 paper abstracts were analyzed and 147 articles were found suitable for an examination of full text. From these, 42 studies were included for synthesis. A total of 16 studies used the consonant-nucleus-consonant (CNC) word recognition test in quiet at 60 db SPL. We found that aside from technical comparisons, very few publications compared speech outcomes across manufacturers of CI systems. However, evidence suggests that these data are available in large CI centers in Germany and the US. Future studies should therefore leverage large data cohorts to perform such comparisons, which could provide critical evaluation criteria and assist both CI recipients and otolaryngologists to make informed performance-based decisions.

Language-to-music transfer effects depend on the tone language: Akan vs. East Asian tone languages

Recent research suggests that speaking a tone language confers benefits in processing pitch in nonlinguistic contexts such as music. This research largely compares speakers of nontone European languages (English, French) with speakers of tone languages in East Asia (Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Thai). However, tone languages exist on multiple continents-notably, languages indigenous to Africa and the Americas. With one exception (Bradley, Psychomusicology, 26(4), 337-345, 2016), no research has assessed whether these tone languages also confer pitch processing advantages. Two studies presented a melody change detection task, using quasirandom note sequences drawn from Western major scale tone probabilities. Listeners were speakers of Akan, a tone language of Ghana, plus speakers from previously tested populations (nontone language speakers and East Asian tone language speakers). In both cases, East Asian tone language speakers showed the strongest musical pitch processing, but Akan speakers did not exceed nontone speakers, despite comparable or better instrument change detection. Results suggest more nuanced effects of tone languages on pitch processing. Greater numbers of tones, presence of contour tones in a language's tone inventory, or possibly greater functional load of tone may be more likely to confer pitch processing benefits than mere presence of tone contrasts.

Music in the Middle: A Culture-Cognition-Mediator Model of Musical Functionality

Music is both universal, appearing in every known human culture, and culture-specific, often defying intelligibility across cultural boundaries. This duality has been the source of debate within the broad community of music researchers, and there have been significant disagreements both on the ontology of music as an object of study and the appropriate epistemology for that study. To help resolve this tension, I present a culture-cognition-mediator model that situates music as a mediator in the mutually constitutive cycle of cultures and selves representing the ways individuals both shape and are shaped by their cultural environments. This model draws on concepts of musical grammars and schema, contemporary theories in developmental and cultural psychology that blur the distinction between nature and nurture, and recent advances in cognitive neuroscience. Existing evidence of both directions of causality is presented, providing empirical support for the conceptual model. The epistemological consequences of this model are discussed, specifically with respect to transdisciplinarity, hybrid research methods, and several potential empirical applications and testable predictions as well as its import for broader ontological conversations around the evolutionary origins of music itself.

Music and language in the crib: Early cross-domain effects of experience on categorical perception of prominence in spoken language

Rhythm perception helps young infants find structure in both speech and music. However, it remains unknown whether categorical perception of suprasegmental linguistic rhythm signaled by a co-variation of multiple acoustic cues can be modulated by prior between- (music) and within-domain (language) experience. Here we tested 6-month-old German-learning infants' ability to have a categorical perception of lexical stress, a linguistic prominence signaled through the co-variation of pitch, intensity, and duration. By measuring infants' pupil size, we find that infants as a group fail to perceive co-variation of these acoustic cues as categorical. However, at an individual level, infants with above-average exposure to music and language at home succeeded. Our results suggest that early exposure to music and infant-directed language can boost the categorical perception of prominence. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: 6-month-old German-learning infants' ability to perceive lexical stress prominence categorically depends on exposure to music and language at home. Infants with high exposure to music show categorical perception. Infants with high exposure to infant-directed language show categorical perception. Co-influence of high exposure to music and infant-directed language may be especially beneficial for categorical perception. Early exposure to predictable rhythms boosts categorical perception of prominence.

The effect of tone language background on cue integration in pitch perception

This study explores the effect of native language and musicality on voice quality cue integration in pitch perception. Previous work by Cui and Kang [(2019). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 146(6), 4086-4096] found no differences in pitch perception strategies between English and Mandarin speakers. The present study asks whether Cantonese listeners may perform differently, as Cantonese consists of multiple level tones. Participants completed two experiments: (i) a forced choice pitch classification experiment involving four spectral slope permutations that vary in fo across an 11 step continuum, and (ii) the MBEMA test that quantifies listeners' musicality. Results show that Cantonese speakers do not differ from English and Mandarin speakers in terms of overall categoricity and perceptual shift, that Cantonese speakers do not have advantages in musicality, and that musicality is a significant predictor for participants' pitch perception strategies. Listeners with higher musicality scores tend to rely more on fo cues than voice quality cues compared to listeners with lower musicality. These findings support the notion that voice quality integration in pitch perception is not language specific, and may be a universal psychoacoustic phenomenon at a non-lexical level.

Tone Deafness in Music Does Not Preclude Distributional Learning of Nonnative Tonal Languages in Individuals With Congenital Amusia

PURPOSE

Previous studies have shown that individuals with congenital amusia exhibit deficient pitch processing across music and language domains. This study investigated whether adult Chinese-speaking listeners with amusia were still able to learn Thai lexical tones based on stimulus frequency of statistical distribution via distributional learning, despite their degraded lexical tone perception.

METHOD

Following a pretest-training-posttest design, 21 amusics and 23 typical, musically intact listeners were assigned into bimodal and unimodal distribution conditions. Listeners were asked to discriminate minimal pairs of Thai mid-level tone and falling tone superimposed on variable base syllables and uttered by different speakers. The perceptual accuracy for each test session and improvement from pretest to posttest were collected and analyzed between the two groups using generalized mixed-effects models.

RESULTS

When discriminating Thai lexical tones, amusics were less accurate than typical listeners. Nonetheless, similarly to control listeners, perceptual gains from pretest to posttest were observed in bimodally rather than unimodally trained amusics, as evidenced by both trained and nontrained test words.

CONCLUSIONS

Amusics are able to learn lexical tones in a second or foreign context of speech. This extends previous research by showing that amusics' distributional learning of linguistic pitch remains largely preserved despite their degraded pitch processing. It is thus likely that manifestations of amusia in speech could not result from their abnormal statistical learning mechanism. This study meanwhile provides a heuristic approach for future studies to apply this paradigm into amusics' treatment to mitigate their pitch-processing disorder.

Language experience predicts music processing in a half-million speakers of fifty-four languages

Tonal languages differ from other languages in their use of pitch (tones) to distinguish words. Lifelong experience speaking and hearing tonal languages has been argued to shape auditory processing in ways that generalize beyond the perception of linguistic pitch to the perception of pitch in other domains like music. We conducted a meta-analysis of prior studies testing this idea, finding moderate evidence supporting it. But prior studies were limited by mostly small sample sizes representing a small number of languages and countries, making it challenging to disentangle the effects of linguistic experience from variability in music training, cultural differences, and other potential confounds. To address these issues, we used web-based citizen science to assess music perception skill on a global scale in 34,034 native speakers of 19 tonal languages (e.g., Mandarin, Yoruba). We compared their performance to 459,066 native speakers of other languages, including 6 pitch-accented (e.g., Japanese) and 29 non-tonal languages (e.g., Hungarian). Whether or not participants had taken music lessons, native speakers of all 19 tonal languages had an improved ability to discriminate musical melodies on average, relative to speakers of non-tonal languages. But this improvement came with a trade-off: tonal language speakers were also worse at processing the musical beat. The results, which held across native speakers of many diverse languages and were robust to geographic and demographic variation, demonstrate that linguistic experience shapes music perception, with implications for relations between music, language, and culture in the human mind.

Does Musicality Assist Foreign Language Learning? Perception and Production of Thai Vowels, Consonants and Lexical Tones by Musicians and Non-Musicians

The music and spoken language domains share acoustic properties such as fundamental frequency (f0, perceived as pitch), duration, resonance frequencies, and intensity. In speech, the acoustic properties form an essential part in differentiating between consonants, vowels, and lexical tones. This study investigated whether there is any advantage of musicality in the perception and production of Thai speech sounds. Two groups of English-speaking adults-one comprising formally trained musicians and the other non-musicians-were tested for their perception and production of Thai consonants, vowels, and tones. For both groups, the perception and production accuracy scores were higher for vowels than consonants and tones, and in production, there was also better accuracy for tones than consonants. Between the groups, musicians (defined as having more than five years of formal musical training) outperformed non-musicians (defined as having less than two years of formal musical training) in both the perception and production of all three sound types. Additional experiential factors that positively influenced the accuracy rates were the current hours of practice per week and those with some indication of an augmentation due to musical aptitude, but only in perception. These results suggest that music training, defined as formal training for more than five years, and musical training, expressed in hours of weekly practice, facilitate the perception and production of non-native speech sounds.

Large-scale iterated singing experiments reveal oral transmission mechanisms underlying music evolution

Speech and song have been transmitted orally for countless human generations, changing over time under the influence of biological, cognitive, and cultural pressures. Cross-cultural regularities and diversities in human song are thought to emerge from this transmission process, but testing how underlying mechanisms contribute to musical structures remains a key challenge. Here, we introduce an automatic online pipeline that streamlines large-scale cultural transmission experiments using a sophisticated and naturalistic modality: singing. We quantify the evolution of 3,424 melodies orally transmitted across 1,797 participants in the United States and India. This approach produces a high-resolution characterization of how oral transmission shapes melody, revealing the emergence of structures that are consistent with widespread musical features observed cross-culturally (small pitch sets, small pitch intervals, and arch-shaped melodic contours). We show how the emergence of these structures is constrained by individual biases in our participants-vocal constraints, working memory, and cultural exposure-which determine the size, shape, and complexity of evolving melodies. However, their ultimate effect on population-level structures depends on social dynamics taking place during cultural transmission. When participants recursively imitate their own productions (individual transmission), musical structures evolve slowly and heterogeneously, reflecting idiosyncratic musical biases. When participants instead imitate others' productions (social transmission), melodies rapidly shift toward homogeneous structures, reflecting shared structural biases that may underpin cross-cultural variation. These results provide the first quantitative characterization of the rich collection of biases that oral transmission imposes on music evolution, giving us a new understanding of how human song structures emerge via cultural transmission.

Implicit Association Test (IAT) Studies Investigating Pitch-Shape Audiovisual Cross-modal Associations Across Language Groups

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In a series of IAT studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception.

Decreased associative processing and memory confidence in aphantasia

Visual imagery and mental reconstruction of scenes are considered core components of episodic memory retrieval. Individuals with absent visual imagery (aphantasia) score lower on tests of autobiographical memory, suggesting that aphantasia may be associated with differences in episodic and associative processing. In this online study, we tested aphantasic participants and controls on associative recognition and memory confidence for three types of associations encoded incidentally: associations between visual-visual and audio-visual stimulus pairs, associations between an object and its location on the screen, and intraitem associations. Aphantasic participants had a lower rate of high-confidence hits in all associative memory tests compared with controls. Performance on auditory-visual associations was correlated with individual differences in a measure of object imagery in the aphantasic group but not in controls. No overall group difference in memory performance was found, indicating that visual imagery selectively contributes to memory confidence. Analysis of the encoding task revealed that aphantasics made fewer associative links between the stimuli, suggesting a role for visual imagery in associative processing of visual and auditory input. These data enhance our understanding of visual imagery contributions to associative memory and further characterize the cognitive profile of aphantasia.

Individuals With Congenital Amusia Show Degraded Speech Perception but Preserved Statistical Learning for Tone Languages

PURPOSE

Individuals with congenital amusia exhibit degraded speech perception. This study examined whether adult Chinese Mandarin listeners with amusia were still able to extract the statistical regularities of Mandarin speech sounds, despite their degraded speech perception.

METHOD

Using the gating paradigm with monosyllabic syllable-tone words, we tested 19 Mandarin-speaking amusics and 19 musically intact controls. Listeners heard increasingly longer fragments of the acoustic signal across eight duration-blocked gates. The stimuli varied in syllable token frequency and syllable-tone co-occurrence probability. The correct syllable-tone word, correct syllable-only, correct tone-only, and correct syllable-incorrect tone responses were compared respectively between the two groups using mixed-effects models.

RESULTS

Amusics were less accurate than controls in terms of the correct word, correct syllable-only, and correct tone-only responses. Amusics, however, showed consistent patterns of top-down processing, as indicated by more accurate responses to high-frequency syllables, high-probability tones, and tone errors all in manners similar to those of the control listeners.

CONCLUSIONS

Amusics are able to learn syllable and tone statistical regularities from the language input. This extends previous work by showing that amusics can track phonological segment and pitch cues despite their degraded speech perception. The observed speech deficits in amusics are therefore not due to an abnormal statistical learning mechanism. These results support rehabilitation programs aimed at improving amusics' sensitivity to pitch.

Musicality in human vocal communication: an evolutionary perspective

Studies show that specific vocal modulations, akin to those of infant-directed speech (IDS) and perhaps music, play a role in communicating intentions and mental states during human social interaction. Based on this, we propose a model for the evolution of musicality-the capacity to process musical information-in relation to human vocal communication. We suggest that a complex social environment, with strong social bonds, promoted the appearance of musicality-related abilities. These social bonds were not limited to those between offspring and mothers or other carers, although these may have been especially influential in view of altriciality of human infants. The model can be further tested in other species by comparing levels of sociality and complexity of vocal communication. By integrating several theories, our model presents a radically different view of musicality, not limited to specifically musical scenarios, but one in which this capacity originally evolved to aid parent-infant communication and bonding, and even today plays a role not only in music but also in IDS, as well as in some adult-directed speech contexts. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)'.

Musicianship Influences Language Effect on Musical Pitch Perception

Given its practical implications, the effect of musicianship on language learning has been vastly researched. Interestingly, growing evidence also suggests that language experience can facilitate music perception. However, the precise nature of this facilitation is not fully understood. To address this research gap, I investigated the interactive effect of language and musicianship on musical pitch and rhythmic perception. Cantonese and English listeners, each divided into musician and non-musician groups, completed the Musical Ear Test and the Raven’s 2 Progressive Matrices. Essentially, an interactive effect of language and musicianship was found on musical pitch but not rhythmic perception. Consistent with previous studies, Cantonese language experience appeared to facilitate musical pitch perception. However, this facilitatory effect was only present among the non-musicians. Among the musicians, Cantonese language experience did not offer any perceptual advantage. The above findings reflect that musicianship influences the effect of language on musical pitch perception. Together with the previous findings, the new findings offer two theoretical implications for the OPERA hypothesis—bi-directionality and mechanisms through which language experience and musicianship interact in different domains.

Dissociation of tone merger and congenital amusia in Hong Kong Cantonese

While the issue of individual variation has been widely studied in second language learning or processing, it is less well understood how perceptual and musical aptitude differences can explain individual variation in native speech processing. In the current study, we make use of tone merger in Hong Kong Cantonese, an ongoing sound change that concerns the merging of tones in perception, production or both in a portion of native speakers, to examine the possible relationship between tone merger and musical and pitch abilities. Although a previous study has reported the occurrence of tone merger independently of musical training, it has not been investigated before whether tone-merging individuals, especially those merging tones in perception, would have inferior musical perception and fine-grained pitch sensitivities, given the close relationship of speech and music. To this end, we tested three groups of tone-merging individuals with various tone perception and production profiles on musical perception and pitch threshold tasks, in comparison to a group of Cantonese speakers with congenital amusia, and another group of controls without tone merger or amusia. Additionally, the amusics were compared with tone-merging individuals on the details of their tone discrimination and production profiles. The results showed a clear dissociation of tone merger and amusia, with the tone-merging individuals exhibiting intact musical and pitch abilities; on the other hand, the amusics demonstrated widespread difficulties in tone discrimination yet intact tone production, in contrast to the highly selective confusion of a specific tone pair in production or discrimination in tone-merging individuals. These findings provide the first evidence that tone merger and amusia are distinct from each other, and further suggest that the cause of tone merger may lie elsewhere rather than being driven by musical or pitch deficits. We also discussed issues arising from the current findings regarding the neural mechanisms of tone merger and amusia.

Participation of Acoustic and Electric Hearing in Perceiving Musical Sounds

Introduction: The objective of our study was to evaluate musical perception and its relation to the quality of life in patients with bimodal binaural auditory stimulation.

Materials and Methods: Nineteen adult patients with a cochlear implant (CI) for minimum 6 months, and moderate to severe contralateral hearing loss with a hearing aid (HA), and 21 normal hearing adults were included in this prospective, cross-sectional study. Pure-tone and speech audiometry, musical test evaluating sound perception characteristics and musical listening abilities, Munich questionnaire for musical habits, and the APHAB questionnaire were recoded. Performance in musical perception test with HA, CI, and HA + CI, and potential correlations between music test, audiometry and questionnaires were investigated.

Results: Bimodal stimulation improved musical perception in several features (sound brightness, roughness, and clarity) in comparison to unimodal hearing, but CI did not add to HA performances in texture, polyphony or musical emotion and even appeared to interfere negatively in pitch perception with HA. Musical perception performances (sound clarity, instrument recognition) appeared to be correlated to hearing-related quality of life (APHAB RV and EC subdomains) but not with speech performances suggesting that the exploration of musical perception complements speech understanding evaluation to better describe every-day life hearing handicap.

Conclusion: Testing musical sound perception provides important information on hearing performances as a complement to speech audiometry and appears to be related to hearing-related quality of life.

Emotion processing in congenital amusia: the deficits do not generalize to written emotion words

Congenital amusia is a lifelong impairment in musical ability. Individuals with amusia are found to show reduced sensitivity to emotion recognition in speech prosody and silent facial expressions, implying a possible cross-modal emotion-processing deficit. However, it is not clear whether the observed deficits are primarily confined to socio-emotional contexts, where visual cues (facial expression) often co-occur with auditory cues (emotion prosody) to express intended emotions, or extend to linguistic emotion processing. In order to better understand the underlying deficiency mechanism of emotion processing in individuals with amusia, we examined whether reduced sensitivity to emotional processing extends to the recognition of emotion category and valence of written words in individuals with amusia. Twenty Cantonese speakers with amusia and 17 controls were tested in three experiments: (1) emotion prosody rating, in which participants rated how much each spoken sentence was expressed in each of the four emotions on 7-point rating scales; (2) written word emotion recognition, in which participants recognized the emotion of written emotion words; and (3) written word valence judgment, in which participants judged the valence of written words. Results showed that participants with amusia preformed significantly less accurately than controls in emotion prosody recognition; in contrast, the two groups showed no significant difference in accuracy rates in both written word tasks (emotion recognition and valence judgment). The results indicate that the impairment of individuals with amusia in emotion processing may not generalize to linguistic emotion processing in written words, implying that the emotion deficit is likely to be restricted to socio-emotional contexts in individuals with amusia.

Lifelong Tone Language Experience does not Eliminate Deficits in Neural Encoding of Pitch in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Atypical pitch processing is a feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), which affects non-tone language speakers' communication. Lifelong auditory experience has been demonstrated to modify genetically-predisposed risks for pitch processing. We examined individuals with ASD to test the hypothesis that lifelong auditory experience in tone language may eliminate impaired pitch processing in ASD. We examined children's and adults' Frequency-following Response (FFR), a neurophysiological component indexing early neural sensory encoding of pitch. Univariate and machine-learning-based analytics suggest less robust pitch encoding and diminished pitch distinctions in the FFR from individuals with ASD. Contrary to our hypothesis, results point to a linguistic pitch encoding impairment associated with ASD that may not be eliminated even by lifelong sensory experience.

Reduced Sensitivity to Between-Category Information but Preserved Categorical Perception of Lexical Tones in Tone Language Speakers With Congenital Amusia

Previous studies have shown that for congenital amusics, long-term tone language experience cannot compensate for lexical tone processing difficulties. However, it is still unknown whether such difficulties are merely caused by domain-transferred insensitivity in lower-level acoustic processing and/or by higher-level phonological processing of linguistic pitch as well. The current P300 study links and extends previous studies by uncovering the neurophysiological mechanisms underpinning lexical tone perception difficulties in Mandarin-speaking amusics. Both the behavioral index (d′) and P300 amplitude showed reduced within-category as well as between-category sensitivity among the Mandarin-speaking amusics regardless of the linguistic status of the signal. The results suggest that acoustic pitch processing difficulties in amusics are manifested profoundly and further persist into the higher-level phonological processing that involves the neural processing of different lexical tone categories. Our findings indicate that long-term tone language experience may not compensate for the reduced acoustic pitch processing in tone language speakers with amusia but rather may extend to the neural processing of the phonological information of lexical tones during the attentive stage. However, from both the behavioral and neural evidence, the peakedness scores of the d′ and P300 amplitude were comparable between amusics and controls. It seems that the basic categorical perception (CP) pattern of native lexical tones is preserved in Mandarin-speaking amusics, indicating that they may have normal or near normal long-term categorical memory.

Effects of language experience on domain-general perceptual strategies

Speech and music are highly redundant communication systems, with multiple acoustic cues signaling the existence of perceptual categories. This redundancy makes these systems robust to the influence of noise, but necessitates the development of perceptual strategies: listeners need to decide how much importance to place on each source of information. Prior empirical work and modeling has suggested that cue weights primarily reflect within-task statistical learning, as listeners assess the reliability with which different acoustic dimensions signal a category and modify their weights accordingly. Here we present evidence that perceptual experience can lead to changes in cue weighting that extend across tasks and across domains, suggesting that perceptual strategies reflect both global biases and local (i.e. task-specific) learning. In two experiments, native speakers of Mandarin (N = 45)-where pitch is a crucial cue to word identity-placed more importance on pitch and less importance on other dimensions compared to native speakers of non-tonal languages English (N = 45) and Spanish (N = 27), during the perception of both English speech and musical beats. In a third experiment, we further show that Mandarin speakers are better able to attend to pitch and ignore irrelevant variation in other dimensions in speech compared to English and Spanish speakers, and even struggle to ignore pitch when asked to attend to other dimensions. Thus, an individual's idiosyncratic auditory perceptual strategy reflects a complex mixture of congenital predispositions, task-specific learning, and biases instilled by extensive experience in making use of important dimensions in their native language.

Manipulation of low-level features modulates grouping strength of auditory objects

A central challenge of auditory processing involves the segregation, analysis, and integration of acoustic information into auditory perceptual objects for processing by higher order cognitive operations. This study explores the influence of low-level features on auditory object perception. Participants provided perceived musicality ratings in response to randomly generated pure tone sequences. Previous work has shown that music perception relies on the integration of discrete sounds into a holistic structure. Hence, high (versus low) ratings were viewed as indicative of strong (versus weak) object formation. Additionally, participants rated sequences in which random subsets of tones were manipulated along one of three low-level dimensions (timbre, amplitude, or fade-in) at one of three strengths (low, medium, or high). Our primary findings demonstrate how low-level acoustic features modulate the perception of auditory objects, as measured by changes in musicality ratings for manipulated sequences. Secondarily, we used principal component analysis to categorize participants into subgroups based on differential sensitivities to low-level auditory dimensions, thereby highlighting the importance of individual differences in auditory perception. Finally, we report asymmetries regarding the effects of low-level dimensions; specifically, the perceptual significance of timbre. Together, these data contribute to our understanding of how low-level auditory features modulate auditory object perception.

The Influence of Tonal and Atonal Bilingualism on Children's Lexical and Non-Lexical Tone Perception

This study examined how bilingualism in an atonal language, in addition to a tonal language, influences lexical and non-lexical tone perception and word learning during childhood. Forty children aged 5;3-7;2, bilingual either in English and Mandarin or English and another atonal language, were tested on Mandarin lexical tone discrimination, level-pitch sine-wave tone discrimination, and learning of novel words differing minimally in Mandarin lexical tone. Mandarin-English bilingual children discriminated between and learned novel words differing minimally in Mandarin lexical tone more accurately than their atonal-English bilingual peers. However, Mandarin-English and atonal-English bilingual children discriminated between level-pitch sine-wave tones with similar accuracy. Moreover, atonal-English bilingual children showed a tendency to perceive differing Mandarin lexical and level-pitch sine-wave tones as identical, whereas their Mandarin-English peers showed no such tendency. These results indicate that bilingualism in a tonal language in addition to an atonal language-but not bilingualism in two atonal languages-allows for continued sensitivity to lexical tone beyond infancy. Moreover, they suggest that although tonal-atonal bilingualism does not enhance sensitivity to differences in pitch between sine-wave tones beyond infancy any more effectively than atonal-atonal bilingualism, it protects against the development of biases to perceive differing lexical and non-lexical tones as identical. Together, the results indicate that, beyond infancy, tonal-atonal bilinguals process lexical tones using different cognitive mechanisms than atonal-atonal bilinguals, but that both groups process level-pitch non-lexical tone using the same cognitive mechanisms.

Perception of musical melody and rhythm as influenced by native language experience

This study used the Musical Ear Test [Wallentin, Nielsen, Friis-Olivarius, Vuust, and Vuust (2010). Learn. Indiv. Diff. 20, 188-196] to compare musical aptitude of native Japanese and Chinese speakers. Although the two groups had similar overall accuracy, they showed significant differences in subtest performance. Specifically, the Chinese speakers outperformed the Japanese counterparts on the melody subtest, but the reverse was observed on the rhythm subtest. Within-group comparisons revealed that Chinese speakers performed better on the melody subtest than the rhythm subtest, while Japanese speakers showed an opposite trend. These results indicate that native language pitch and durational patterns of the listener can have a profound effect on the perception of music melody and rhythm, respectively, reflecting language-to-music transfer of learning.

ASPM-lexical tone association in speakers of a tone language: Direct evidence for the genetic-biasing hypothesis of language evolution

How language has evolved into more than 7000 varieties today remains a question that puzzles linguists, anthropologists, and evolutionary scientists. The genetic-biasing hypothesis of language evolution postulates that genes and language features coevolve, such that a population that is genetically predisposed to perceiving a particular linguistic feature would tend to adopt that feature in their language. Statistical studies that correlated a large number of genetic variants and linguistic features not only generated this hypothesis but also specifically pinpointed a linkage between ASPM and lexical tone. However, there is currently no direct evidence for this association and, therefore, the hypothesis. In an experimental study, we provide evidence to link ASPM with lexical tone perception in a sample of over 400 speakers of a tone language. In addition to providing the first direct evidence for the genetic-biasing hypothesis, our results have implications for further studies of linguistic anthropology and language disorders.

Congenital blindness enhances perception of musical rhythm more than melody in Mandarin speakers

This study adopted the Musical Ear Test [Wallentin, Nielsen, Friis-Olivarius, Vuust, and Vuust (2010). Learn. Indiv. Diff. 20, 188-196] to compare musical competence of sighted and congenitally blind Mandarin speakers. On the rhythm subtest, the blind participants outperformed the sighted. On the melody subtest, however, the two groups performed equally well. Compared with sighted speakers of non-tonal languages reported in previous studies [Wallentin, Nielsen, Friis-Olivarius, Vuust, and Vuust (2010). Learn. Indiv. Diff. 20, 188-196; Bhatara, Yeung, and Nazzi (2015). J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 41(2), 277-282], sighted Mandarin speakers performed better only on the melody subtest. These results indicate that tonal language experience and congenital blindness exert differential influences on musical aptitudes with rhythm perception reflecting a cross-modal compensation effect and melody perception dominated by a cross-domain language-to-music transfer effect.

Talker normalization in typical Cantonese-speaking listeners and congenital amusics: Evidence from event-related potentials

Despite the lack of invariance in the mapping between the acoustic signal and phonological representation, typical listeners are capable of using information of a talker's vocal characteristics to recognize phonemes, a process known as "talker normalization". The current study investigated the time course of talker normalization in typical listeners and individuals with congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of refined pitch processing. We examined the event-related potentials (ERPs) underling lexical tone processing in 24 Cantonese-speaking amusics and 24 typical listeners (controls) in two conditions: blocked-talker and mixed-talker conditions. The results demonstrated that for typical listeners, effects of talker variability can be observed as early as in the N1 time-window (100-150 ms), with the N1 amplitude reduced in the mixed-talker condition. Significant effects were also found in later components: the N2b/c peaked significantly earlier and the P3a and P3b amplitude was enhanced in the blocked-talker condition relative to the mixed-talker condition, especially for the tone pair that is more difficult to discriminate. These results suggest that the blocked-talker mode of stimulus presentation probably facilitates auditory processing and requires less attentional effort with easier speech categorization than the mixed-talker condition, providing neural evidence for the "active control theory". On the other hand, amusics exhibited comparable N1 amplitude to controls in both conditions, but deviated from controls in later components. They demonstrated overall later N2b/c peak latency significantly reduced P3a amplitude in the blocked-talker condition and reduced P3b amplitude irrespective of talker conditions. These results suggest that the amusic brain was intact in the auditory processing of talker normalization processes, as reflected by the comparable N1 amplitude, but exhibited reduced automatic attentional switch to tone changes in the blocked-talker condition, as captured by the reduced P3a amplitude, which presumably underlies a previously reported perceptual "anchoring" deficit in amusics. Altogether, these findings revealed the time course of talker normalization processes in typical listeners and extended the finding that conscious pitch processing is impaired in the amusic brain.

A tonal-language benefit for pitch in normally-hearing and cochlear-implanted children

In tonal languages, voice pitch inflections change the meaning of words, such that the brain processes pitch not merely as an acoustic characterization of sound but as semantic information. In normally-hearing (NH) adults, this linguistic pressure on pitch appears to sharpen its neural encoding and can lead to perceptual benefits, depending on the task relevance, potentially generalizing outside of the speech domain. In children, however, linguistic systems are still malleable, meaning that their encoding of voice pitch information might not receive as much neural specialization but might generalize more easily to ecologically irrelevant pitch contours. This would seem particularly true for early-deafened children wearing a cochlear implant (CI), who must exhibit great adaptability to unfamiliar sounds as their sense of pitch is severely degraded. Here, we provide the first demonstration of a tonal language benefit in dynamic pitch sensitivity among NH children (using both a sweep discrimination and labelling task) which extends partially to children with CI (i.e., in the labelling task only). Strong age effects suggest that sensitivity to pitch contours reaches adult-like levels early in tonal language speakers (possibly before 6 years of age) but continues to develop in non-tonal language speakers well into the teenage years. Overall, we conclude that language-dependent neuroplasticity can enhance behavioral sensitivity to dynamic pitch, even in extreme cases of auditory degradation, but it is most easily observable early in life.

Tone language experience modulates the effect of long-term musical training on musical pitch perception

Long-term musical training is widely reported to enhance music pitch perception. However, it remains unclear whether tone language experience influences the effect of long-term musical training on musical pitch perception. The present study addressed this question by testing 30 Cantonese and 30 non-tonal language speakers, each divided equally into musician and non-musician groups, on pitch height and pitch interval discrimination. Musicians outperformed non-musicians among non-tonal language speakers, but not among Cantonese speakers on the pitch height discrimination task. However, musicians outperformed non-musicians among Cantonese speakers, but not among non-tonal language speakers on the pitch interval discrimination task. These results suggest that the effect of long-term musical training on musical pitch perception is shaped by tone language experience and varies across different pitch perception tasks.

Impaired perceptual normalization of lexical tones in Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics

Human listeners perceive speech sounds relative to acoustic cues in context. In this study the authors examined how congenital amusia, a pitch-processing disorder, affects perceptual normalization of lexical tones according to the distribution of F0 cues in context. Sixteen Cantonese-speaking amusics and 16 controls were tested on the effects of shifting F0 level in four types of contexts on tone perception: nonspeech, reversed speech, semantically anomalous speech, and meaningful speech contexts. Performance of controls replicated previous studies, showing contrastive changes of tone perception according to the shifted F0 level of anomalous and meaningful contexts, which were native speech contexts with phonological cues to estimate a talker's tone space. Effects of nonspeech and reversed contexts were small and inconsistent, and tone perception performance varied depending on the typicality of a talker's F0 range. In contrast to controls, amusics showed reduced context effects in anomalous and meaningful contexts, but largely comparable context effects in nonspeech and reversed contexts, indicating a deficit of amusics in tone normalization through phonological cues in native speech contexts. These findings suggest that the ability to perceive speech sounds relative to acoustic cues in context is not a universal endowment, and that this ability is impaired substantially in amusics.

Roles of posterior parietal and dorsal premotor cortices in relative pitch processing: Comparing musical intervals to lexical tones

Humans use time-varying pitch patterns to convey information in music and speech. Recognition of musical melodies and lexical tones relies on relative pitch (RP), the ability to identify intervals between two pitches. RP processing in music is usually more fine-grained than that in tonal languages. In Western music, there are twelve pitch categories within an octave, whereas there are only three level (non-glide) lexical tones in Taiwanese (or Taiwanese Hokkien, a tonal language). The present study aimed at comparing the neural substrates underlying RP processing of musical melodic intervals with that of level lexical tones in Taiwanese. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data from fourteen participants with good RP were analyzed. The results showed that imagining the sounds of visually presented musical intervals was associated with enhanced activity in the central subregion of the right dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC), right posterior parietal cortex (PPC), and right dorsal precuneus compared to auditory imagery of visually presented Taiwanese bi-character words with level lexical tones. During the sound-congruence-judgement task (auditory imagery of musical intervals or bi-character words, and subsequently judging if the imagined sounds were melodically congruent with heard sounds), the contrast of the musical minus linguistic conditions yielded activity in the bilateral dPMC-PPC network and dorsal precuneus, with the dPMC activated in the rostral subregion. The central dPMC and PPC may mediate the attention-based maintenance of pitch intervals, whereas the dorsal precuneus may support attention control and the spatial/sensorimotor processing of the fine-grained pitch structures of music. When judging the congruence between the imagined and heard musical intervals, the bilateral rostral dPMC may play a role in attention control, working memory, evaluation of motor activities, and monitoring mechanisms. Based on the findings of this study and recent studies of amusia, we suggest that higher order cognitive operations are critical to the more fine-grained pitch processing of musical melodies compared to lexical tones.

Normal pre-attentive and impaired attentive processing of lexical tones in Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics

The neural underpinnings of congenital amusia, an innate neurogenetic disorder of musical pitch processing, are not well understood. Previous studies suggest that amusia primarily impairs attentive processing (P300) of small pitch deviations in music, leaving pre-attentive pitch processing (mismatch negativity or MMN) more or less intact. However, it remains unknown whether the same neuro-dynamic mechanism of deficiency underlies pitch processing in speech, where amusics also often show impairment behaviorally. The current study examined how lexical tones are processed in pre-attentive (MMN) and attentive (P300) conditions in 24 Cantonese-speaking amusics and 24 matched controls. At the pre-attentive level, Cantonese-speaking amusics exhibited normal MMN responses to lexical tone changes, even for tone pairs with small pitch differences (mid level vs. low level tone; high rising vs. low rising tone). However, at the attentive level, amusics exhibited reduced P3a amplitude for all tone pairs, and further reduced P3b amplitude for tone pairs with small pitch differences. These results suggest that the amusic brain detects tone changes normally pre-attentively, but shows impairment in consciously detecting the same tone differences. Consistent with previous findings in nonspeech pitch processing, this finding provides support for a domain-general neuro-dynamic mechanism of deficient attentive pitch processing in amusia.

Factors affecting pitch discrimination performance in a cohort of extensively phenotyped healthy volunteers

Despite efforts to characterize the different aspects of musical abilities in humans, many elements of this complex area remain unknown. Musical abilities are known to be associated with factors like intelligence, training, and sex, but a comprehensive evaluation of the simultaneous impact of multiple factors has not yet been performed. Here, we assessed 918 healthy volunteers for pitch discrimination abilities—their ability to tell two tones close in pitch apart. We identified the minimal threshold that the participants could detect, and we found that better performance was associated with higher intelligence, East Asian ancestry, male sex, younger age, formal music training–especially before age 6–and English as the native language. All these factors remained significant when controlling for the others, with general intelligence, musical training, and male sex having the biggest impacts. We also performed a small GWAS and gene-based collapsing analysis, identifying no significant associations. Future genetic studies of musical abilities should involve large sample sizes and an unbiased genome-wide approach, with the factors highlighted here included as important covariates.

Is Congenital Amusia a Disconnection Syndrome? A Study Combining Tract- and Network-Based Analysis

Previous studies on congenital amusia mainly focused on the impaired fronto-temporal pathway. It is possible that neural pathways of amusia patients on a larger scale are affected. In this study, we investigated changes in structural connections by applying both tract-based and network-based analysis to DTI data of 12 subjects with congenital amusia and 20 demographic-matched normal controls. TBSS (tract-based spatial statistics) was used to detect microstructural changes. The results showed that amusics had higher diffusivity indices in the corpus callosum, the right inferior/superior longitudinal fasciculus, and the right inferior frontal-occipital fasciculus (IFOF). The axial diffusivity values of the right IFOF were negatively correlated with musical scores in the amusia group. Network-based analysis showed that the efficiency of the brain network was reduced in amusics. The impairments of WM tracts were also found to be correlated with reduced network efficiency in amusics. This suggests that impaired WM tracts may lead to the reduced network efficiency seen in amusics. Our findings suggest that congenital amusia is a disconnection syndrome.

Deficits of congenital amusia beyond pitch: Evidence from impaired categorical perception of vowels in Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder of fine-grained pitch processing in music and speech. However, it remains unclear whether amusia is a pitch-specific deficit, or whether it affects frequency/spectral processing more broadly, such as the perception of formant frequency in vowels, apart from pitch. In this study, in order to illuminate the scope of the deficits, we compared the performance of 15 Cantonese-speaking amusics and 15 matched controls on the categorical perception of sound continua in four stimulus contexts: lexical tone, pure tone, vowel, and voice onset time (VOT). Whereas lexical tone, pure tone and vowel continua rely on frequency/spectral processing, the VOT continuum depends on duration/temporal processing. We found that the amusic participants performed similarly to controls in all stimulus contexts in the identification, in terms of the across-category boundary location and boundary width. However, the amusic participants performed systematically worse than controls in discriminating stimuli in those three contexts that depended on frequency/spectral processing (lexical tone, pure tone and vowel), whereas they performed normally when discriminating duration differences (VOT). These findings suggest that the deficit of amusia is probably not pitch specific, but affects frequency/spectral processing more broadly. Furthermore, there appeared to be differences in the impairment of frequency/spectral discrimination in speech and nonspeech contexts. The amusic participants exhibited less benefit in between-category discriminations than controls in speech contexts (lexical tone and vowel), suggesting reduced categorical perception; on the other hand, they performed inferiorly compared to controls across the board regardless of between- and within-category discriminations in nonspeech contexts (pure tone), suggesting impaired general auditory processing. These differences imply that the frequency/spectral-processing deficit might be manifested differentially in speech and nonspeech contexts in amusics—it is manifested as a deficit of higher-level phonological processing in speech sounds, and as a deficit of lower-level auditory processing in nonspeech sounds.

Pitch Perception in Tone Language-Speaking Adults With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorders

Enhanced low-level pitch perception has been universally reported in autism spectrum disorders (ASD). This study examined whether tone language speakers with ASD exhibit this advantage. The pitch perception skill of 20 Cantonese-speaking adults with ASD was compared with that of 20 neurotypical individuals. Participants discriminated pairs of real syllable, pseudo-syllable (syllables that do not conform the phonotactic rules or are accidental gaps), and non-speech (syllables with attenuated high-frequency segmental content) stimuli contrasting pitch levels. The results revealed significantly higher discrimination ability in both groups for the non-speech stimuli than for the pseudo-syllables with one semitone difference. No significant group differences were noted. Different from previous findings, post hoc analysis found that enhanced pitch perception was observed in a subgroup of participants with ASD showing no history of delayed speech onset. The tone language experience may have modulated the pitch processing mechanism in the speakers in both ASD and non-ASD groups.

Keypress-Based Musical Preference Is Both Individual and Lawful

Musical preference is highly individualized and is an area of active study to develop methods for its quantification. Recently, preference-based behavior, associated with activity in brain reward circuitry, has been shown to follow lawful, quantifiable patterns, despite broad variation across individuals. These patterns, observed using a keypress paradigm with visual stimuli, form the basis for relative preference theory (RPT). Here, we sought to determine if such patterns extend to non-visual domains (i.e., audition) and dynamic stimuli, potentially providing a method to supplement psychometric, physiological, and neuroimaging approaches to preference quantification. For this study, we adapted our keypress paradigm to two sets of stimuli consisting of seventeenth to twenty-first century western art music (Classical) and twentieth to twenty-first century jazz and popular music (Popular). We studied a pilot sample and then a separate primary experimental sample with this paradigm, and used iterative mathematical modeling to determine if RPT relationships were observed with high R² fits. We further assessed the extent of heterogeneity in the rank ordering of keypress-based responses across subjects. As expected, individual rank orderings of preferences were quite heterogeneous, yet we observed mathematical patterns fitting these data similar to those observed previously with visual stimuli. These patterns in music preference were recurrent across two cohorts and two stimulus sets, and scaled between individual and group data, adhering to the requirements for lawfulness. Our findings suggest a general neuroscience framework that predicts human approach/avoidance behavior, while also allowing for individual differences and the broad diversity of human choices; the resulting framework may offer novel approaches to advancing music neuroscience, or its applications to medicine and recommendation systems.

Pitch Perception in the First Year of Life, a Comparison of Lexical Tones and Musical Pitch

Pitch variation is pervasive in speech, regardless of the language to which infants are exposed. Lexical tone is influenced by general sensitivity to pitch. We examined whether the development in lexical tone perception may develop in parallel with perception of pitch in other cognitive domains namely music. Using a visual fixation paradigm, 100 and one 4- and 12-month-old Dutch infants were tested on their discrimination of Chinese rising and dipping lexical tones as well as comparable three-note musical pitch contours. The 4-month-old infants failed to show a discrimination effect in either condition, whereas the 12-month-old infants succeeded in both conditions. These results suggest that lexical tone perception may reflect and relate to general pitch perception abilities, which may serve as a basis for developing more complex language and musical skills.

Prevalence of congenital amusia

Congenital amusia (commonly known as tone deafness) is a lifelong musical disorder that affects 4% of the population according to a single estimate based on a single test from 1980. Here we present the first large-based measure of prevalence with a sample of 20 000 participants, which does not rely on self-referral. On the basis of three objective tests and a questionnaire, we show that (a) the prevalence of congenital amusia is only 1.5%, with slightly more females than males, unlike other developmental disorders where males often predominate; (b) self-disclosure is a reliable index of congenital amusia, which suggests that congenital amusia is hereditary, with 46% first-degree relatives similarly affected; (c) the deficit is not attenuated by musical training and (d) it emerges in relative isolation from other cognitive disorder, except for spatial orientation problems. Hence, we suggest that congenital amusia is likely to result from genetic variations that affect musical abilities specifically.

Enhanced music sensitivity in 9-month-old bilingual infants

This study explores the influence of bilingualism on the cognitive processing of language and music. Specifically, we investigate how infants learning a non-tone language perceive linguistic and musical pitch and how bilingualism affects cross-domain pitch perception. Dutch monolingual and bilingual infants of 8-9 months participated in the study. All infants had Dutch as one of the first languages. The other first languages, varying among bilingual families, were not tone or pitch accent languages. In two experiments, infants were tested on the discrimination of a lexical (N = 42) or a violin (N = 48) pitch contrast via a visual habituation paradigm. The two contrasts shared identical pitch contours but differed in timbre. Non-tone language learning infants did not discriminate the lexical contrast regardless of their ambient language environment. When perceiving the violin contrast, bilingual but not monolingual infants demonstrated robust discrimination. We attribute bilingual infants' heightened sensitivity in the musical domain to the enhanced acoustic sensitivity stemming from a bilingual environment. The distinct perceptual patterns between language and music and the influence of acoustic salience on perception suggest processing diversion and association in the first year of life. Results indicate that the perception of music may entail both shared neural network with language processing, and unique neural network that is distinct from other cognitive functions.

Neural bases of congenital amusia in tonal language speakers

Congenital amusia is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disorder of fine-grained pitch processing. In this fMRI study, we examined the neural bases of congenial amusia in speakers of a tonal language - Cantonese. Previous studies on non-tonal language speakers suggest that the neural deficits of congenital amusia lie in the music-selective neural circuitry in the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). However, it is unclear whether this finding can generalize to congenital amusics in tonal languages. Tonal language experience has been reported to shape the neural processing of pitch, which raises the question of how tonal language experience affects the neural bases of congenital amusia. To investigate this question, we examined the neural circuitries sub-serving the processing of relative pitch interval in pitch-matched Cantonese level tone and musical stimuli in 11 Cantonese-speaking amusics and 11 musically intact controls. Cantonese-speaking amusics exhibited abnormal brain activities in a widely distributed neural network during the processing of lexical tone and musical stimuli. Whereas the controls exhibited significant activation in the right superior temporal gyrus (STG) in the lexical tone condition and in the cerebellum regardless of the lexical tone and music conditions, no activation was found in the amusics in those regions, which likely reflects a dysfunctional neural mechanism of relative pitch processing in the amusics. Furthermore, the amusics showed abnormally strong activation of the right middle frontal gyrus and precuneus when the pitch stimuli were repeated, which presumably reflect deficits of attending to repeated pitch stimuli or encoding them into working memory. No significant group difference was found in the right IFG in either the whole-brain analysis or region-of-interest analysis. These findings imply that the neural deficits in tonal language speakers might differ from those in non-tonal language speakers, and overlap partly with the neural circuitries of lexical tone processing (e.g. right STG).

Musicianship and Tone Language Experience Are Associated with Differential Changes in Brain Signal Variability

Musicianship has been associated with auditory processing benefits. It is unclear, however, whether pitch processing experience in nonmusical contexts, namely, speaking a tone language, has comparable associations with auditory processing. Studies comparing the auditory processing of musicians and tone language speakers have shown varying degrees of between-group similarity with regard to perceptual processing benefits and, particularly, nonlinguistic pitch processing. To test whether the auditory abilities honed by musicianship or speaking a tone language differentially impact the neural networks supporting nonlinguistic pitch processing (relative to timbral processing), we employed a novel application of brain signal variability (BSV) analysis. BSV is a metric of information processing capacity and holds great potential for understanding the neural underpinnings of experience-dependent plasticity. Here, we measured BSV in electroencephalograms of musicians, tone language-speaking nonmusicians, and English-speaking nonmusicians (controls) during passive listening of music and speech sound contrasts. Although musicians showed greater BSV across the board, each group showed a unique spatiotemporal distribution in neural network engagement: Controls had greater BSV for speech than music; tone language-speaking nonmusicians showed the opposite effect; musicians showed similar BSV for both domains. Collectively, results suggest that musical and tone language pitch experience differentially affect auditory processing capacity within the cerebral cortex. However, information processing capacity is graded: More experience with pitch is associated with greater BSV when processing this cue. Higher BSV in musicians may suggest increased information integration within the brain networks subserving speech and music, which may be related to their well-documented advantages on a wide variety of speech-related tasks.

Pitch perception and production in congenital amusia: Evidence from Cantonese speakers

This study investigated pitch perception and production in speech and music in individuals with congenital amusia (a disorder of musical pitch processing) who are native speakers of Cantonese, a tone language with a highly complex tonal system. Sixteen Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics and 16 controls performed a set of lexical tone perception, production, singing, and psychophysical pitch threshold tasks. Their tone production accuracy and singing proficiency were subsequently judged by independent listeners, and subjected to acoustic analyses. Relative to controls, amusics showed impaired discrimination of lexical tones in both speech and non-speech conditions. They also received lower ratings for singing proficiency, producing larger pitch interval deviations and making more pitch interval errors compared to controls. Demonstrating higher pitch direction identification thresholds than controls for both speech syllables and piano tones, amusics nevertheless produced native lexical tones with comparable pitch trajectories and intelligibility as controls. Significant correlations were found between pitch threshold and lexical tone perception, music perception and production, but not between lexical tone perception and production for amusics. These findings provide further evidence that congenital amusia is a domain-general language-independent pitch-processing deficit that is associated with severely impaired music perception and production, mildly impaired speech perception, and largely intact speech production.

The Enhanced Musical Rhythmic Perception in Second Language Learners

Previous research suggests that mastering languages with distinct rather than similar rhythmic properties enhances musical rhythmic perception. This study investigates whether learning a second language (L2) contributes to enhanced musical rhythmic perception in general, regardless of first and second languages rhythmic properties. Additionally, we investigated whether this perceptual enhancement could be alternatively explained by exposure to musical rhythmic complexity, such as the use of compound meter in Turkish music. Finally, it investigates if an enhancement of musical rhythmic perception could be observed among L2 learners whose first language relies heavily on pitch information, as is the case with tonal languages. Therefore, we tested Turkish, Dutch and Mandarin L2 learners of English and Turkish monolinguals on their musical rhythmic perception. Participants' phonological and working memory capacities, melodic aptitude, years of formal musical training and daily exposure to music were assessed to account for cultural and individual differences which could impact their rhythmic ability. Our results suggest that mastering a L2 rather than exposure to musical rhythmic complexity could explain individuals' enhanced musical rhythmic perception. An even stronger enhancement of musical rhythmic perception was observed for L2 learners whose first and second languages differ regarding their rhythmic properties, as enhanced performance of Turkish in comparison with Dutch L2 learners of English seem to suggest. Such a stronger enhancement of rhythmic perception seems to be found even among L2 learners whose first language relies heavily on pitch information, as the performance of Mandarin L2 learners of English indicates. Our findings provide further support for a cognitive transfer between the language and music domain.

Effects of Early Bilingual Experience with a Tone and a Non-Tone Language on Speech-Music Integration

We investigated music and language processing in a group of early bilinguals who spoke a tone language and a non-tone language (Cantonese and Dutch). We assessed online speech-music processing interactions, that is, interactions that occur when speech and music are processed simultaneously in songs, with a speeded classification task. In this task, participants judged sung pseudowords either musically (based on the direction of the musical interval) or phonologically (based on the identity of the sung vowel). We also assessed longer-term effects of linguistic experience on musical ability, that is, the influence of extensive prior experience with language when processing music. These effects were assessed with a task in which participants had to learn to identify musical intervals and with four pitch-perception tasks. Our hypothesis was that due to their experience in two different languages using lexical versus intonational tone, the early Cantonese-Dutch bilinguals would outperform the Dutch control participants. In online processing, the Cantonese-Dutch bilinguals processed speech and music more holistically than controls. This effect seems to be driven by experience with a tone language, in which integration of segmental and pitch information is fundamental. Regarding longer-term effects of linguistic experience, we found no evidence for a bilingual advantage in either the music-interval learning task or the pitch-perception tasks. Together, these results suggest that being a Cantonese-Dutch bilingual does not have any measurable longer-term effects on pitch and music processing, but does have consequences for how speech and music are processed jointly.

Brainstem encoding of speech and musical stimuli in congenital amusia: evidence from Cantonese speakers

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical processing that also impacts subtle aspects of speech processing. It remains debated at what stage(s) of auditory processing deficits in amusia arise. In this study, we investigated whether amusia originates from impaired subcortical encoding of speech (in quiet and noise) and musical sounds in the brainstem. Fourteen Cantonese-speaking amusics and 14 matched controls passively listened to six Cantonese lexical tones in quiet, two Cantonese tones in noise (signal-to-noise ratios at 0 and 20 dB), and two cello tones in quiet while their frequency-following responses (FFRs) to these tones were recorded. All participants also completed a behavioral lexical tone identification task. The results indicated normal brainstem encoding of pitch in speech (in quiet and noise) and musical stimuli in amusics relative to controls, as measured by FFR pitch strength, pitch error, and stimulus-to-response correlation. There was also no group difference in neural conduction time or FFR amplitudes. Both groups demonstrated better FFRs to speech (in quiet and noise) than to musical stimuli. However, a significant group difference was observed for tone identification, with amusics showing significantly lower accuracy than controls. Analysis of the tone confusion matrices suggested that amusics were more likely than controls to confuse between tones that shared similar acoustic features. Interestingly, this deficit in lexical tone identification was not coupled with brainstem abnormality for either speech or musical stimuli. Together, our results suggest that the amusic brainstem is not functioning abnormally, although higher-order linguistic pitch processing is impaired in amusia. This finding has significant implications for theories of central auditory processing, requiring further investigations into how different stages of auditory processing interact in the human brain.