Abstract
Pitch processing is a critical ability on which humans’ tonal musical experience depends, and which is also of paramount importance for decoding prosody in speech. Congenital amusia refers to deficits in the ability to properly process musical pitch, and recent evidence has suggested that this musical pitch disorder may impact upon the processing of speech sounds. Here we present the first electrophysiological evidence demonstrating that individuals with amusia who speak Mandarin Chinese are impaired in classifying prosody as appropriate or inappropriate during a speech comprehension task. When presented with inappropriate prosody stimuli, control participants elicited a larger P600 and smaller N100 relative to the appropriate condition. In contrast, amusics did not show significant differences between the appropriate and inappropriate conditions in either the N100 or the P600 component. This provides further evidence that the pitch perception deficits associated with amusia may also affect intonation processing during speech comprehension in those who speak a tonal language such as Mandarin, and suggests music and language share some cognitive and neural resources.
Highlights
It has been suggested that humans are predisposed to process melodies in a holistic manner [1]
There is some overlap between the groups, the amusic participants as a whole do not perform as well as the controls
This was confirmed with an independent samples t-test revealing that there was a significant difference between the two groups [amusics mean 6 Sex Years education (SD): 2.0263.8, controls mean 6 SD: 2.5563.5, t (20) = 3.45, p,0.005] with the amusic group performing worse at the acceptability judgment
Summary
It has been suggested that humans are predisposed to process melodies in a holistic manner [1] Consistent with this is the finding that before the age of 1 year infants can perceive and recognize musical patterns of pitch [2]. 4% of the general population in the United Kingdom [3], and 3.4% in China [4] have problems in the perception of musical pitch This pitch related disorder is known as congenital amusia (amusia hereafter) [5]. Individuals with amusia have difficulties in finegrained pitch discrimination [6±9], pitch contour discriminations [6,10], anomalous pitch detection, dissonance-pleasantness judgments, and tune recognition from songs [11] They may show a mismatch between pitch perception and production abilities [12]. Recent studies suggest that the pitch related deficits are associated with impairments of pitch memory [13±15]
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