Musical familiarity in congenital amusia: Evidence from a gating paradigm

Purpose: Individuals with congenital amusia exhibit degraded speech perception. This study examined whether adult Chinese Mandarin listeners with amusia were still able to extract the statistical regularities of Mandarin speech sounds, despite their degraded speech perception. Method: Using the gating paradigm with monosyllabic syllable–tone words, we tested 19 Mandarin-speaking amusics and 19 musically intact controls. Listeners heard increasingly longer fragments of the acoustic signal across eight duration-blocked gates. The stimuli varied in syllable token frequency and syllable–tone co-occurrence probability. The correct syllable–tone word, correct syllable-only, correct tone-only, and correct syllable–incorrect tone responses were compared respectively between the two groups using mixed-effects models. Results: Amusics were less accurate than controls in terms of the correct word, correct syllable-only, and correct tone-only responses. Amusics, however, showed consistent patterns of top-down processing, as indicated by more accurate responses to high-frequency syllables, high-probability tones, and tone errors all in manners similar to those of the control listeners. Conclusions: Amusics are able to learn syllable and tone statistical regularities from the language input. This extends previous work by showing that amusics can track phonological segment and pitch cues despite their degraded speech perception. The observed speech deficits in amusics are therefore not due to an abnormal statistical learning mechanism. These results support rehabilitation programs aimed at improving amusics' sensitivity to pitch.

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Pitch Processing of Music and Speech in Congenital Amusia

Advances in Psychological Science ◽

10.3724/sp.j.1042.2012.00159 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 20 (2) ◽

pp. 159-167

Author(s):

Cun-Mei JIANG ◽

Yu-Fang YANG

Keyword(s):

Pitch Processing ◽

Congenital Amusia

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Tracking of pitch probabilities in congenital amusia

Neuropsychologia ◽

10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.02.034 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 50 (7) ◽

pp. 1483-1493 ◽

Cited By ~ 43

Author(s):

Diana Omigie ◽

Marcus T. Pearce ◽

Lauren Stewart

Keyword(s):

Congenital Amusia

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SPEECH INTONATION PERCEPTION DEFICITS IN MUSICAL TONE DEAFNESS (CONGENITAL AMUSIA)

Music Perception An Interdisciplinary Journal ◽

10.1525/mp.2008.25.4.357 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 25 (4) ◽

pp. 357-368 ◽

Cited By ~ 70

Author(s):

ANIRUDDH D. PATEL ◽

MEREDITH WONG ◽

JESSICA FOXTON ◽

ALIETTE LOCHY ◽

ISABELLE PERETZ

Keyword(s):

Rate Of Change ◽

Neural Mechanisms ◽

French Canadian ◽

Congenital Amusia ◽

Music And Language ◽

Pitch Direction ◽

Melody Perception ◽

Language And Music ◽

Musical Tone ◽

Important Evidence

TO WHAT EXTENT DO MUSIC and language share neural mechanisms for processing pitch patterns? Musical tone-deafness (amusia) provides important evidence on this question. Amusics have problems with musical melody perception, yet early work suggested that they had no problems with the perception of speech intonation (Ayotte, Peretz, & Hyde, 2002). However, here we show that about 30% of amusics from independent studies (British and French-Canadian) have difficulty discriminating a statement from a question on the basis of a final pitch fall or rise. This suggests that pitch direction perception deficits in amusia (known from previous psychophysical work) can extend to speech. For British amusics, the direction deficit is related to the rate of change of the final pitch glide in statements/ questions, with increased discrimination difficulty when rates are relatively slow. These findings suggest that amusia provides a useful window on the neural relations between melodic processing in language and music.

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Statistical learning of speech, not music, in congenital amusia

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06429.x ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 1252 (1) ◽

pp. 361-366 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Isabelle Peretz ◽

Jenny Saffran ◽

Daniele Schön ◽

Nathalie Gosselin

Keyword(s):

Statistical Learning ◽

Congenital Amusia

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Perceptual Learning of Pitch Direction in Congenital Amusia

Music Perception An Interdisciplinary Journal ◽

10.1525/mp.2017.34.3.335 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 34 (3) ◽

pp. 335-351 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Fang Liu ◽

Cunmei Jiang ◽

Tom Francart ◽

Alice H. D. Chan ◽

Patrick C. M. Wong

Keyword(s):

Perceptual Learning ◽

Auditory Training ◽

Further Training ◽

Normal Functioning ◽

Positive Evidence ◽

Adaptive Tracking ◽

Congenital Amusia ◽

Pitch Direction ◽

Significant Difference ◽

Training Post

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder of musical processing for which no effective treatments have been found. The present study aimed to treat amusics’ impairments in pitch direction identification through auditory training. Prior to training, twenty Chinese-speaking amusics and 20 matched controls were tested on the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) and two psychophysical pitch threshold tasks for identification of pitch direction in speech and music. Subsequently, ten of the twenty amusics undertook 10 sessions of adaptive-tracking pitch direction training, while the remaining 10 received no training. Post training, all amusics were retested on the pitch threshold tasks and on the three pitch-based MBEA subtests. Trained amusics demonstrated significantly improved thresholds for pitch direction identification in both speech and music, to the level of non-amusic control participants, although no significant difference was observed between trained and untrained amusics in the MBEA subtests. This provides the first clear positive evidence for improvement in pitch direction processing through auditory training in amusia. Further training studies are required to target different deficit areas in congenital amusia, so as to reveal which aspects of improvement will be most beneficial to the normal functioning of musical processing.

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Meta-analytic evidence for the non-modularity of pitch processing in congenital amusia

10.31234/osf.io/8shg4 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Dominique T Vuvan ◽

Marília Nunes-Silva ◽

Isabelle Peretz

Keyword(s):

Meta Analysis ◽

Pitch Perception ◽

Developmental Trajectory ◽

Pitch Discrimination ◽

Major Theme ◽

Performance Gap ◽

Pitch Processing ◽

Congenital Amusia ◽

Musical Pitch ◽

Using Data

A major theme driving research in congenital amusia is related to the modularity of this musical disorder, with two possible sources of the amusic pitch perception deficit. The first possibility is that the amusic deficit is due to a broad disorder of acoustic pitch processing that has the effect of disrupting downstream musical pitch processing, and the second is that amusia is specific to a musical pitch processing module. To interrogate these hypotheses, we performed a meta-analysis on two types of effect sizes contained within 42 studies in the amusia literature: the performance gap between amusics and controls on tasks of pitch discrimination, broadly defined, and the correlation between specifically acoustic pitch perception and musical pitch perception. To augment the correlation database, we also calculated this correlation using data from 106 participants tested by our own research group. We found strong evidence for the acoustic account of amusia. The magnitude of the performance gap was moderated by the size of pitch change, but not by whether the stimuli were composed of tones or speech. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between an individual's acoustic and musical pitch perception. However, individual cases show a double dissociation between acoustic and musical processing, which suggests that although most amusic cases are probably explainable by an acoustic deficit, there is heterogeneity within the disorder. Finally, we found that tonal language fluency does not influence the performance gap between amusics and controls, and that there was no evidence that amusics fare worse with pitch direction tasks than pitch discrimination tasks. These results constitute a quantitative review of the current literature of congenital amusia, and suggest several new directions for research, including the experimental induction of amusic behaviour through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and the systematic exploration of the developmental trajectory of this disorder.

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