amusia and tone perception

[Ping Li]

Dear Colleagues,

Have you had a chance to work with anyone who suffers from amusia in
tonal languages? Or if you know of such work? I was intrigued by an
NPR program on Isabelle Peretz's research on amusia in normal healthy
adults. It's an intriguing problem!

Best wishes,

Ping Li

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Ping Li, Ph.D., Associate Professor
Department of Psychology, University of Richmond
Richmond, VA 23173, USA
Email: pli at richmond.edu
Phone: (804) 289-8125 (O), 287-1236 (lab); Fax: (804) 287-1905
http://www.richmond.edu/~pli/  or  http://cogsci.richmond.edu/
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P.S. message from Peretz enclosed here with her permission.

>
>Dear Dr. Peretz,
>
>Thanks a lot for your prompt response!
>
>The situation in Chinese is much worse than in any other language. I
>wonder if anyone with amusia can get around this problem in Chinese:
>
>4 lexical tones
>400 syllables
>4,000 monosyllable words (at least)
>
>Each syllable carries one of the 4 tones to differentiate meaning,
>resulting in about 1,600 unique phonological patterns. Still, many
>monosyllables that differ in meaning would be homophonous, but
>context may help there.
>
>Chinese linguists describe the lexical tones on a 5-point scale,
>with duration indicated by two digits:
>
>Tone 1 --> 5 5
>Tone 2 --> 3 5
>Tone 3 --> 213
>Tone 4 --> 5 1
>
>The other side of the story may be: because the language relies so
>heavily on tones, people really have to develop abilities in
>differentiating them for "survival". Thus, we would hypothesize that
>one would find fewer people suffering amusia in China. My colleague
>Joan Sereno has done work on training native English speakers to
>perceive tones, and she got some interesting results with
>neuroimaging measures (I am copying this message to her).
>
>It's just intriguing to think of the fact that a Chinese speaker
>cannot differentiate tones!
>
>Best wishes,
>
>Ping
>
>
>
>>Dear Dr. Ping Li,
>>I am pleased that you wrote to me. I suppose that there are as many
>>amusic individuals in China as everywhere else. This is of course
>>an empirical issue. And these cases may have difficulties with tone
>>languages in general, including Chinese. I met one such case.
>>However, she claimed that she got around that problem by using
>>context and pragmatics. Again, I have not studied her formally.
>>The key question is how large are the intervals used in tone
>>languages; do you have any idea ? In English intonation patterns,
>>the changes are quite large compared to music. Even a defective
>>pitch analysis system could handle these changes.
>>To my knowledge, there is no published study on this particular question.
>>Best wishes,
>>Isabelle Peretz
>>
>>
>>>Dear Dr. Peretz,
>>>
>>>I was very intrigued by the NPR program on amusia in normal
>>>healthy adults (1.16.2002). As a psycholinguist and a native
>>>speaker of Chinese - a language that employs tones to different
>>>lexical meanings, I was wondering if amusia is a common problem
>>>among some Chinese people -- if so, that implies that these people
>>>cannot speak properly or understand anything!
>>>
>>>Do you know of any research in this area?
>>>
>>>Thanks.
>>>
>>>Sincerely
>>>
>>>Ping Li