The Mechanism of Speech Processing in Congenital Amusia: Evidence from Mandarin Speakers

被引:57
作者
Liu, Fang [1 ]
Jiang, Cunmei [2 ]
Thompson, William Forde [3 ]
Xu, Yi [4 ]
Yang, Yufang [5 ]
Stewart, Lauren [6 ]
机构
[1] Stanford Univ, Ctr Study Language & Informat, Stanford, CA 94305 USA
[2] Shanghai Normal Univ, Mus Coll, Shanghai, Peoples R China
[3] Macquarie Univ, Dept Psychol, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
[4] UCL, Dept Speech Hearing & Phonet Sci, London, England
[5] Chinese Acad Sci, Inst Psychol, Beijing 100101, Peoples R China
[6] Univ London, Dept Psychol, London, England
基金
英国经济与社会研究理事会;
关键词
GRAINED PITCH DISCRIMINATION; PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS; TONE-DEAFNESS; LEXICAL TONES; LINGUISTIC EXPERIENCE; TUNE DEAFNESS; PERCEPTION; CHINESE; INTONATION; IDENTIFICATION;
D O I
10.1371/journal.pone.0030374
中图分类号
O [数理科学和化学]; P [天文学、地球科学]; Q [生物科学]; N [自然科学总论];
学科分类号
07 ; 0710 ; 09 ;
摘要
Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder of pitch perception that causes severe problems with music processing but only subtle difficulties in speech processing. This study investigated speech processing in a group of Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia. Thirteen Mandarin amusics and thirteen matched controls participated in a set of tone and intonation perception tasks and two pitch threshold tasks. Compared with controls, amusics showed impaired performance on word discrimination in natural speech and their gliding tone analogs. They also performed worse than controls on discriminating gliding tone sequences derived from statements and questions, and showed elevated thresholds for pitch change detection and pitch direction discrimination. However, they performed as well as controls on word identification, and on statement-question identification and discrimination in natural speech. Overall, tasks that involved multiple acoustic cues to communicative meaning were not impacted by amusia. Only when the tasks relied mainly on pitch sensitivity did amusics show impaired performance compared to controls. These findings help explain why amusia only affects speech processing in subtle ways. Further studies on a larger sample of Mandarin amusics and on amusics of other language backgrounds are needed to consolidate these results.
引用
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页数:11
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