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- Title
Tone Deafness in Music Does Not Preclude Distributional Learning of Nonnative Tonal Languages in Individuals With Congenital Amusia.
- Authors
Jiaqiang Zhu; Xiaoxiang Chen; Fei Chen; Caicai Zhang; Jing Shao; Wiener, Seth
- Abstract
Purpose: Previous studies have shown that individuals with congenital amusia exhibit deficient pitch processing across music and language domains. This study investigated whether adult Chinese-speaking listeners with amusia were still able to learn Thai lexical tones based on stimulus frequency of statistical distribution via distributional learning, despite their degraded lexical tone perception. Method: Following a pretest–training–posttest design, 21 amusics and 23 typi- cal, musically intact listeners were assigned into bimodal and unimodal distribu- tion conditions. Listeners were asked to discriminate minimal pairs of Thai mid- level tone and falling tone superimposed on variable base syllables and uttered by different speakers. The perceptual accuracy for each test session and improvement from pretest to posttest were collected and analyzed between the two groups using generalized mixed-effects models. Results: When discriminating Thai lexical tones, amusics were less accurate than typical listeners. Nonetheless, similarly to control listeners, perceptual gains from pretest to posttest were observed in bimodally rather than unimod- ally trained amusics, as evidenced by both trained and nontrained test words. Conclusions: Amusics are able to learn lexical tones in a second or foreign context of speech. This extends previous research by showing that amusics’ distributional learning of linguistic pitch remains largely preserved despite their degraded pitch processing. It is thus likely that manifestations of amusia in speech could not result from their abnormal statistical learning mechanism. This study meanwhile provides a heuristic approach for future studies to apply this paradigm into amusics’ treatment to mitigate their pitch-processing disorder.
- Subjects
SPEECH perception; STATISTICS; HUMAN research subjects; MUSICAL pitch; TIME; LANGUAGE &; languages; PAIRED comparisons (Mathematics); WORD deafness; LEARNING; PRE-tests &; post-tests; PSYCHOLOGICAL tests; INFORMED consent (Medical law); T-test (Statistics); DESCRIPTIVE statistics; RESEARCH funding; MUSICAL perception; MUSIC; DATA analysis; DATA analysis software; PROMPTS (Psychology)
- Publication
Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research, 2023, Vol 66, Issue 7, p2461
- ISSN
1092-4388
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1044/2023_JSLHR-22-00572