Native Experience with a Tone Language Enhances Pitch Discrimination and the Timing of Neural Responses to Pitch Change

Abstract

Native tone language experience has been linked with alterations in the production and perception of pitch in language, as well as with the brain response to linguistic and non-linguistic tones. Here we use two experiments to address whether these changes apply to the discrimination of simple pitch changes and pitch intervals. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from native Mandarin speakers and a control group during a same/different task with pairs of pure tones differing only in pitch height, and with pure tone pairs differing only in interval distance. Behaviorally, Mandarin speakers were more accurate than controls at detecting both pitch and interval changes, showing a sensitivity to small pitch changes and interval distances that was absent in the control group. Converging evidence from ERPs obtained during the same tasks revealed an earlier response to change relative to no-change trials in Mandarin speakers, as well as earlier differentiation of trials by change direction relative to controls. These findings illustrate the cross-domain influence of language experience on the perception of pitch, suggesting that the native use of tonal pitch contours in language leads to a general enhancement in the acuity of pitch representations.

Tone-language speakers show hemispheric specialization and differential cortical processing of contour and interval cues for pitch

“…Comparisons between language groups allowed us to assess whether tone language speakers show a hemispheric specialization for contour and interval processing. Consistent with previous neurophysiological studies (Gandour et al, 2000;Chandrasekaran et al, 2007;Giuliano et al, 2011;Bidelman and Lee, 2015), we expected to observe enhanced pitch MMNs in Chinese listeners across the board. Additionally, based on previous behavioral and lesion data (Peretz, 1990;Lie´geois-Chauvel et al, 1998), we expected to find that the cortical encoding of pitch contour and interval in Chinese listeners is dominated by neural mechanisms of the right and left hemisphere, respectively.…”

“…This inconsistency presumably results from the fact that laterality effects are either too subtle to detect via ERPs or that they occur in processing stages after the automatic generation of the MMN (Trainor et al, 2002;Fujioka et al, 2004). However, previous studies have demonstrated that both cortical (Gandour et al, 2000;Chandrasekaran et al, 2007;Giuliano et al, 2011) and subcortical (Bidelman et al, 2011a,b) neural activity is modulated by long-term experience with a tone language (e.g., Mandarin Chinese). While all languages use pitch for suprasegmental linguistic distinctions (e.g., stress, intonation), tone languages are unique in that pitch is used to make lexical distinctions at the word level.…”

Diminished Whole-brain but Enhanced Peri-sylvian Connectivity in Absolute Pitch Musicians

“…In nonmusicians, only one hub was located in peri-sylvian language regions. This indicates, therefore, a tendency at least toward more local clustering in the peri-sylvian brain area in RP musicians and supports the hypothesis that the brain of musicians is partly prepared to process auditory language information differently (see, for further support of this hypothesis, the special issue on the relation between music and language; Ettlinger, Margulis, & Wong, 2011;Giuliano, Pfordresher, Stanley, Narayana, & Wicha, 2011;Ott, Langer, Oechslin, Meyer, & Jäncke, 2011;Patel, 2011;Schon & Francois, 2011).…”

Transfer effects in the vocal imitation of speech and song.

“…Previous work suggests individuals vary considerably with respect to the vocal imitation of sung pitch (Berkowska & Dalla Bella, 2009;Dalla Bella, Berkowska, & Sowinski, 2011;Pfordresher, 2011;Pfordresher & Brown, 2007;Pfordresher & Mantell, 2009;Pfordresher et al, 2010;Welch, 1979), and further evidence suggests that such "poor-pitch" singers may have difficulty transferring from one sequence to anther, given that they exhibit a tendency (not seen in accurate singers) to make pitch errors that drift in the direction of their own comfortable pitch range (Pfordresher & Brown, 2007). Poor-pitch singers may have similar difficulty imitating speech (Mantell & Pfordresher, 2013), in line with integrationist views of music and language.…”