Cerebral dominance for pitch contrasts in tone language speakers and in musically untrained and trained English speakers

Abstract

Speakers of a tone language, Thai, recognize pitch contrasts which are linguistically significant in their language better at the right ear in a dichotic listening task, but show no ear advantage for the same pitch contrasts occurring in a nonlinguistic context. American English speakers, divided into musically untrained and trained groups, show no ear advantage for those same pitch contrasts. The only effect of musical training is an enhancement of left ear accuracy for pitch contrast recognition.