scholarly journals Impaired Explicit Processing of Musical Syntax and Tonality in a Group of Mandarin-Speaking Congenital Amusics

2016 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cunmei Jiang ◽  
Fang Liu ◽  
William Forde Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Processing ◽  
Pitch Discrimination ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Probe Tone ◽  
Congenital Amusia ◽  
Music Structure ◽  
Musical Syntax ◽  
Tonal Hierarchy ◽  
Explicit Processing ◽  
Pitch Distance

We examined explicit processing of musical syntax and tonality in a group of Han Chinese Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia, and the extent to which pitch discrimination impairments were associated with syntax and tonality processing. In Experiment 1, we assessed whether congenital amusia is associated with impaired explicit processing of musical syntax. Congruity ratings were examined for syntactically regular or irregular endings in harmonic and melodic contexts. Unlike controls, amusic participants failed to explicitly distinguish regular from irregular endings in both contexts. Surprisingly, however, a concurrent manipulation of pitch distance did not affect the processing of musical syntax for amusics, and their impaired music-syntactic processing was uncorrelated with their pitch discrimination thresholds. In Experiment 2, we assessed tonality perception using a probe-tone paradigm. Recovery of the tonal hierarchy was less evident for the amusic group than for the control group, and this reduced sensitivity to tonality in amusia was also unrelated to poor pitch discrimination. These findings support the view that music structure is processed by cognitive and neural resources that operate independently of pitch discrimination, and that these resources are impaired in explicit judgments for individuals with congenital amusia.

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

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.

Perception of a tonal hierarchy derived from Korean music

2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 580-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael E. Lantz ◽  
Jung-Kyong Kim ◽  
Lola L. Cuddy
Keyword(s):  
Goodness Of Fit ◽  
Total Duration ◽  
Probe Tone ◽  
Korean Music ◽  
Pitch Structure ◽  
Tonal Hierarchy ◽  
Pentatonic Scale ◽  
Relative Salience

In two experiments, we assessed recovery of a tonal hierarchy in tone sequences. In Experiment 1, sequence tones were five tones of a Korean pentatonic scale plus seven nonscale tones located between scale tones. Sequences included all 12 tones, randomly ordered. Duration of scale tones in each sequence corresponded to the total duration of each tone in a piece of Korean music, as quantified by U. Nam (1998). Nonscale tones were shorter than scale tones. Listeners were either familiar or unfamiliar with the style of Korean music. Sequences were played 12 times, each time followed by 1 of 12 probe tones that had occurred in the sequence. Participants rated goodness-of-fit of the probe tone to the sequence. Ratings by both groups reflected the Korean tonal hierarchy including the relative salience of scale tones. Experiment 2 followed the same method and tones, but duration was assigned to tones quasi-randomly so that duration did not emphasize intervallic relationships in the Korean scale. Ratings differentiated long and short tones, but showed no other clear organization among long tones. Differences in results between experiments suggest that duration helps listeners organize pitch structure only when duration emphasizes intervallic relationships such as the near-perfect fifth.

scholarly journals Difficulties with Pitch Discrimination Influences Pitch Memory Performance: Evidence from Congenital Amusia

PLoS ONE ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. e79216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cunmei Jiang ◽  
Vanessa K. Lim ◽  
Hang Wang ◽  
Jeff P. Hamm
Keyword(s):  
Memory Performance ◽  
Pitch Discrimination ◽  
Congenital Amusia

scholarly journals Place pitch discrimination and speech recognition in cochlear implants users

1996 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan J. Hanekom ◽  
Robert V. Shannon
Keyword(s):  
Speech Perception ◽  
Cochlear Implants ◽  
Speech Processing ◽  
Patient Specific ◽  
Pitch Discrimination ◽  
Discrimination Ability ◽  
Processing Strategies ◽  
Place Pitch ◽  
Pitch Distance ◽  
The Relationship

The considerable variability in speech perception performance among cochlear implant patients makes it difficult to compare the effectiveness of different speech processing strategies. One result is that optimal individualized processor parameter setting is not always achieved. This paper investigates the relationship between place pitch discrimination ability and speech perception to establish whether pitch ranking could be used as an aid in better patient-specific fitting of processors. Three subjects participated in this study. Place pitch discrimination ability was measured and this information was used to design new channel to electrode allocations for each subject. Several allocations were evaluated with speech tests with consonant, vowel and sentence material. It is shown that there is correlation between the perceptual pitch distance between electrodes and speech perception performance. The results indicate that pitch ranking ability might be used both as an indicator of  the speech perception potential of an implant user and in the choice of better electrode configurations.

scholarly journals Pitch discrimination associated with phonological awareness: Evidence from congenital amusia

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanan Sun ◽  
Xuejing Lu ◽  
Hao Tam Ho ◽  
William Forde Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Phonological Awareness ◽  
Pitch Discrimination ◽  
Congenital Amusia

scholarly journals Impairment of both languages in late bilinguals with dementia of the Alzheimer type

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
MÉLANIE MANCHON ◽  
KARIN BUETLER ◽  
FRANÇOISE COLOMBO ◽  
LUCAS SPIERER ◽  
FRÉDÉRIC ASSAL ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Matched Control ◽  
Syntactic Processing ◽  
Repeated Measure ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Alzheimer Type ◽  
Language Performance ◽  
Matched Control Group ◽  
L1 And L2 ◽  
Main Effects ◽  
Late Bilinguals

Neuropsychological theories raise the question if in late bilinguals with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), the second language (L2) may be more impaired than the first (L1). We compared language performance in different tasks of oral comprehension (semantic and syntactic) and production (naming, repetition and fluency) in L1 and L2 in a group of 13 late proficient bilinguals wit DAT immersion, and a matched control group of 12 healthy late bilinguals. Two-way mixed repeated-measure ANOVAs with factors Language and Group revealed main effects of Group (p < .05) indicating that DAT affects all aspects of language. There was no Group × Language interaction, suggesting that DAT affects both languages similarly. Our study thus shows that neurodegenerative diseases affect L1 and L2 in a parallel manner, particularly at the levels of semantic, lexical and syntactic processing. These results speak in favour of a shared L1 and L2 network in late bilinguals.

scholarly journals Idiosyncratic Grammars: Syntactic Processing in Second Language Comprehension Uses Subjective Feature Representations

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (7) ◽  
pp. 1428-1444 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Lemhöfer ◽  
Herbert Schriefers ◽  
Peter Indefrey
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Syntactic Processing ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Gender Agreement ◽  
Feature Representations ◽  
L2 Learners

Learning the syntax of a second language (L2) often represents a big challenge to L2 learners. Previous research on syntactic processing in L2 has mainly focused on how L2 speakers respond to “objective” syntactic violations, that is, phrases that are incorrect by native standards. In this study, we investigate how L2 learners, in particular those of less than near-native proficiency, process phrases that deviate from their own, “subjective,” and often incorrect syntactic representations, that is, whether they use these subjective and idiosyncratic representations during sentence comprehension. We study this within the domain of grammatical gender in a population of German learners of Dutch, for which systematic errors of grammatical gender are well documented. These L2 learners as well as a control group of Dutch native speakers read Dutch sentences containing gender-marked determiner–noun phrases in which gender agreement was either (objectively) correct or incorrect. Furthermore, the noun targets were selected such that, in a high proportion of nouns, objective and subjective correctness would differ for German learners. The ERP results show a syntactic violation effect (P600) for objective gender agreement violations for native, but not for nonnative speakers. However, when the items were re-sorted for the L2 speakers according to subjective correctness (as assessed offline), the P600 effect emerged as well. Thus, rather than being insensitive to violations of gender agreement, L2 speakers are similarly sensitive as native speakers but base their sensitivity on their subjective—sometimes incorrect—representations.

scholarly journals Probe Tone Paradigm Reveals Less Differentiated Tonal Hierarchy in Rock Music

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique T Vuvan ◽  
Bryn Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Rock Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Music Cognition ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Probe Tone ◽  
Pitch Organization ◽  
Tonal Structure ◽  
Pitch Structure ◽  
Tonal Hierarchy ◽  
The Common

Krumhansl &amp; Kessler’s (1982) pioneering experiments on tonal hierarchies in Western music have long been considered the gold standard for researchers interested in the mental representation of musical pitch structure. The current experiment used the probe tone technique to investigate the tonal hierarchy in classical and rock music. As predicted, the observed profiles for these two styles were structurally similar, reflecting a shared underlying Western tonal structure. Most interestingly, however, the rock profile was significantly less differentiated than the classical profile, reflecting theoretical work that describes pitch organization in rock music as more permissive and less hierarchical than in classical music. These results contradict the assumption that music from the common-practice era is representative of all Western musics, and challenges music cognition researchers to be more thoughtful when choosing stimuli and models of pitch structure for their experiments.

scholarly journals Probing the minor tonal hierarchy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique T Vuvan ◽  
Jon Prince ◽  
Mark A. Schmuckler
Keyword(s):  
Mental Representation ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Probe Tone ◽  
Preceding Context ◽  
Tonal Hierarchy ◽  
Musical Context

One facet of tonality perception that has been fairly understudied in the years since Krumhansl and colleagues’ groundbreaking work on tonality (Krumhansl &amp; Kessler, 1982; Krumhansl &amp; Shepard, 1979) is the music theoretical notion that the minor scale can have one of three distinct forms: natural, harmonic, or melodic. The experiment reported here fills this gap by testing if listeners form distinct mental representations of the minor tonal hierarchy based on the three forms of the minor scale. Listeners heard a musical context (a scale or a sequence of chords) consisting of one of the three minor types (natural, harmonic, or melodic) and rated a probe tone according to how well it belonged with the preceding context. Listeners’ probe tone ratings corresponded well to the minor type that had been heard in the preceding context, regardless of whether the context was scalar or chordal. These data expand psychological research on the perception of tonality, and provide a convenient reference point for researchers investigating the mental representation of Western musical structure.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document