Abstract
Research suggests that musical skills are associated with phonological abilities. To further investigate this association, we examined whether phonological impairments are evident in individuals with poor music abilities. Twenty individuals with congenital amusia and 20 matched controls were assessed on a pure-tone pitch discrimination task, a rhythm discrimination task, and four phonological tests. Amusic participants showed deficits in discriminating pitch and discriminating rhythmic patterns that involve a regular beat. At a group level, these individuals performed similarly to controls on all phonological tests. However, eight amusics with severe pitch impairment, as identified by the pitch discrimination task, exhibited significantly worse performance than all other participants in phonological awareness. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that pitch discrimination thresholds predicted phonological awareness beyond that predicted by phonological short-term memory and rhythm discrimination. In contrast, our rhythm discrimination task did not predict phonological awareness beyond that predicted by pitch discrimination thresholds. These findings suggest that accurate pitch discrimination is critical for phonological processing. We propose that deficits in early-stage pitch discrimination may be associated with impaired phonological awareness and we discuss the shared role of pitch discrimination for processing music and speech.
Highlights
In view of these findings, it is reasonable to hypothesize that individuals with poor musical abilities have parallel phonological deficits[7]
We investigated the association between music perception and phonological abilities in individuals with and without congenital amusia
Our results suggest that congenital amusia is not generally associated with phonological deficits
Summary
In view of these findings, it is reasonable to hypothesize that individuals with poor musical abilities have parallel phonological deficits[7]. Deafness was determined by assessing the ability of participants to recognize wrong notes in popular melodies, and pitch and rhythm discrimination skills were not assessed. It is unclear from this study whether the phonological impairments observed were related to deficits in pitch and rhythm processing. We asked whether deficits in pitch and rhythm processing are associated with language deficits, in particular, phonological processing To answer this question, we tested participants who exhibit significantly impaired musical abilities (i.e., congenital amusia; which is comparable to tune deafness, but diagnosed differently), and their matched controls on several measures of phonological ability, including phonological awareness, phonological short-term memory and rapid naming[28]. If music processing and phonological processing draw upon the same auditory perceptual mechanisms[30], amusic participants should perform worse than control participants on the phonological tests
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