title: Pitch perception and production in congenital amusia: Evidence from Cantonese speakers.
abstract: This study investigated pitch perception and production in speech and music in individuals with congenital amusia (a disorder of musical pitch processing) who are native speakers of Cantonese, a tone language with a highly complex tonal system. Sixteen Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics and 16 controls performed a set of lexical tone perception, production, singing, and psychophysical pitch threshold tasks. Their tone production accuracy and singing proficiency were subsequently judged by independent listeners, and subjected to acoustic analyses. Relative to controls, amusics showed impaired discrimination of lexical tones in both speech and non-speech conditions. They also received lower ratings for singing proficiency, producing larger pitch interval deviations and making more pitch interval errors compared to controls. Demonstrating higher pitch direction identification thresholds than controls for both speech syllables and piano tones, amusics nevertheless produced native lexical tones with comparable pitch trajectories and intelligibility as controls. Significant correlations were found between pitch threshold and lexical tone perception, music perception and production, but not between lexical tone perception and production for amusics. These findings provide further evidence that congenital amusia is a domain-general language-independent pitch-processing deficit that is associated with severely impaired music perception and production, mildly impaired speech perception, and largely intact speech production.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Earley Gate, Reading RG6 6AL, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Fang
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, S637332, Singapore, Singapore.
authors.forename: Alice H D
authors.initials: AH
authors.lastname: Chan
authors.affiliation: School of Audiology and Speech Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
authors.forename: Valter
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Ciocca
authors.affiliation: International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Roquet
authors.affiliation: International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research, Université de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
authors.forename: Isabelle
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Peretz
authors.affiliation: Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages and Brain and Mind Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
authors.forename: Patrick C M
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Wong
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001308:Auditory Perceptual Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D010898:Pitch Perception; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement / Q000379:methods*