Congenital amusics use a secondary pitch mechanism to identify lexical tones

Bones, O; Wong, P

Abstract

Amusia is a pitch perception disorder associated with deficits in processing and production of both musical and lexical tones, which previous reports have suggested may be constrained to fine-grained pitch judgements. In the present study speakers of tone-languages, in which lexical tones are used to convey meaning, identified words present in chimera stimuli containing conflicting pitch-cues in the temporal fine-structure and temporal envelope, and which therefore conveyed two distinct utterances. Amusics were found to be more likely than controls to judge the word according to the envelope pitch-cues. This demonstrates that amusia is not associated with fine-grained pitch judgements alone, and is consistent with there being two distinct pitch mechanisms and with amusics having an atypical reliance on a secondary mechanism based upon envelope cues.

Citation

Bones, O., & Wong, P. (2017). Congenital amusics use a secondary pitch mechanism to identify lexical tones. Neuropsychologia, 104, 48-53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.08.004

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 3, 2017
• Online Publication Date: Aug 4, 2017
• Publication Date: Sep 1, 2017
• Deposit Date: Sep 5, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 13, 2017
• Journal: Neuropsychologia
• Print ISSN: 0028-3932
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Volume: 104
• Pages: 48-53
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.08.004
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.08.004
• Related Public URLs: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/neuropsychologia
• Additional Information: Funders : National Science Foundation (USA); Projects : Musical and Lexical Tone Deafness; Grant Number: BCS-1125144