Reverse Engineering Tone-Deafness: Disrupting Pitch-Matching by Creating Temporary Dysfunctions in the Auditory-Motor Network

Altered functional connectivity during speech perception in congenital amusia

Individuals with congenital amusia have a lifelong history of unreliable pitch processing. Accordingly, they downweight pitch cues during speech perception and instead rely on other dimensions such as duration. We investigated the neural basis for this strategy. During fMRI, individuals with amusia (N = 15) and controls (N = 15) read sentences where a comma indicated a grammatical phrase boundary. They then heard two sentences spoken that differed only in pitch and/or duration cues and selected the best match for the written sentence. Prominent reductions in functional connectivity were detected in the amusia group between left prefrontal language-related regions and right hemisphere pitch-related regions, which reflected the between-group differences in cue weights in the same groups of listeners. Connectivity differences between these regions were not present during a control task. Our results indicate that the reliability of perceptual dimensions is linked with functional connectivity between frontal and perceptual regions and suggest a compensatory mechanism.