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Congenital amusics use a secondary pitch mechanism to identify lexical tones

Bones, O; Wong, P

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Authors

O Bones

P Wong



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

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