Abstract
Background: Congenital amusia is a disorder that is known to affect the processing of musical pitch. Although individuals with amusia rarely show language deficits in daily life, a number of findings point to possible impairments in speech prosody that amusic individuals may compensate for by drawing on linguistic information. Using EEG, we investigated (1) whether the processing of speech prosody is impaired in amusia and (2) whether emotional linguistic information can compensate for this impairment.Method: Twenty Chinese amusics and 22 matched controls were presented pairs of emotional words spoken with either statement or question intonation while their EEG was recorded. Their task was to judge whether the intonations were the same.Results: Amusics exhibited impaired performance on the intonation-matching task for emotional linguistic information, as their performance was significantly worse than that of controls. EEG results showed a reduced N2 response to incongruent intonation pairs in amusics compared with controls, which likely reflects impaired conflict processing in amusia. However, our EEG results also indicated that amusics were intact in early sensory auditory processing, as revealed by a comparable N1 modulation in both groups.Conclusion: We propose that the impairment in discriminating speech intonation observed among amusic individuals may arise from an inability to access information extracted at early processing stages. This, in turn, could reflect a disconnection between low-level and high-level processing.
Highlights
Congenital amusia is a disorder that impacts individuals’ ability to discriminate musical pitch
Similar to the control participants, amusia participants displayed a reduced N1 amplitude at posterior electrodes in response to incongruent, M = −0.26, SE = 0.10, than congruent intonation, M = −0.43, SE = 0.08. This congruence effect appears to be constrained to the posterior electrodes, as paired-sample t-tests yielded a significant difference between the congruent and incongruent condition only at posterior, t(41) = 2.70, p < 0.01, d = 0.42, but not anterior electrode sites, t(41) = 0.24, p > 0.81, d = 0.04
The ANOVA revealed a significant interaction involving Emotion, Group, LR, and AP, F(1, 40) = 5.49, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.12. When this complex interaction was unpacked by Emotion, we found a significant interaction between Group and AP for negative words, F(1, 40) = 4.88, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.11, but not for positive words, F(1, 40) = 0.06, p > 0.81, η2 < 0.01
Summary
Congenital amusia is a disorder that impacts individuals’ ability to discriminate musical pitch. This impairment cannot be explained by hearing or neurological problems, low intelligence, or lack of exposure to music (Ayotte et al, 2002). Studies have shown that amusics exhibit deficits in processing of lexical tone (Nan et al, 2010; Liu et al, 2012) They are reported to have difficulties processing linguistic and emotional prosody in speech (Patel et al, 2008; Jiang et al, 2010; Liu et al, 2010; Thompson et al, 2012). Using EEG, we investigated (1) whether the processing of speech prosody is impaired in amusia and (2) whether emotional linguistic information can compensate for this impairment
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