Abstract
Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder of pitch perception that causes severe problems with music processing but only subtle difficulties in speech processing. This study investigated speech processing in a group of Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia. Thirteen Mandarin amusics and thirteen matched controls participated in a set of tone and intonation perception tasks and two pitch threshold tasks. Compared with controls, amusics showed impaired performance on word discrimination in natural speech and their gliding tone analogs. They also performed worse than controls on discriminating gliding tone sequences derived from statements and questions, and showed elevated thresholds for pitch change detection and pitch direction discrimination. However, they performed as well as controls on word identification, and on statement-question identification and discrimination in natural speech. Overall, tasks that involved multiple acoustic cues to communicative meaning were not impacted by amusia. Only when the tasks relied mainly on pitch sensitivity did amusics show impaired performance compared to controls. These findings help explain why amusia only affects speech processing in subtle ways. Further studies on a larger sample of Mandarin amusics and on amusics of other language backgrounds are needed to consolidate these results.
Highlights
As a neuro-developmental disorder of music processing, congenital amusia provides a unique opportunity for studying the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying language and music processing [1]
No significant interactions were found. This indicates that, regardless of focus condition, amusics performed significantly worse than controls on both word discrimination and glide discrimination
Speech processing in Mandarin amusics previous studies have suggested that amusia impacts upon speech processing in subtle ways for speakers of both tone and non-tonal languages [4,5,6,7,8], it was unclear whether the ‘lexical tone agnosia’ reported for Mandarin amusics was caused by pitchprocessing deficits or impaired phonological awareness [7]
Summary
As a neuro-developmental disorder of music processing, congenital amusia (amusia hereafter) provides a unique opportunity for studying the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying language and music processing [1]. This is because despite suffering from severe musical impairments in everyday life [2,3], individuals with amusia (amusics hereafter) only demonstrate subtle problems with linguistic tone and intonation processing under laboratory conditions [4,5,6,7,8]. When exposed to relatively small pitch direction contrasts in the final words of statements and questions in English and French, most amusics showed impaired performance on discrimination, identification, and imitation of these utterances [4,6]
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