Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects the processing of musical pitch in speakers of non-tonal languages like English and French. We assessed whether this musical disorder exists among speakers of Mandarin Chinese who use pitch to alter the meaning of words. Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, we tested 117 healthy young Mandarin speakers with no self-declared musical problems and 22 individuals who reported musical difficulties and scored two standard deviations below the mean obtained by the Mandarin speakers without amusia. These 22 amusic individuals showed a similar pattern of musical impairment as did amusic speakers of non-tonal languages, by exhibiting a more pronounced deficit in melody than in rhythm processing. Furthermore, nearly half the tested amusics had impairments in the discrimination and identification of Mandarin lexical tones. Six showed marked impairments, displaying what could be called lexical tone agnosia, but had normal tone production. Our results show that speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin may experience musical pitch disorder despite early exposure to speech-relevant pitch contrasts. The observed association between the musical disorder and lexical tone difficulty indicates that the pitch disorder as defining congenital amusia is not specific to music or culture but is rather general in nature.

The present study introduces a novel tool for assessing musical abilities in children: The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Musical Abilities (MBEMA). The battery, which comprises tests of memory, scale, contour, interval, and rhythm, was administered to 245 children in Montreal and 91 in Beijing (Experiment 1), and an abbreviated version was administered to an additional 85 children in Montreal (in less than 20 min; Experiment 2). All children were 6–8 years of age. Their performance indicated that both versions of the MBEMA are sensitive to individual differences and to musical training. The sensitivity of the tests extends to Mandarin-speaking children despite the fact that they show enhanced performance relative to French-speaking children. Because this Chinese advantage is not limited to musical pitch but extends to rhythm and memory, it is unlikely that it results from early exposure to a tonal language. In both cultures and versions of the tests, amount of musical practice predicts performance. Thus, the MBEMA can serve as an objective, short and up-to-date test of musical abilities in a variety of situations, from the identification of children with musical difficulties to the assessment of the effects of musical training in typically developing children of different cultures.

Musical training confers advantages in speech-sound processing, which could play an important role in early childhood education. To understand the mechanisms of this effect, we used event-related potential and behavioral measures in a longitudinal design. Seventy-four Mandarin-speaking children aged 4-5 y old were pseudorandomly assigned to piano training, reading training, or a no-contact control group. Six months of piano training improved behavioral auditory word discrimination in general as well as word discrimination based on vowels compared with the controls. The reading group yielded similar trends. However, the piano group demonstrated unique advantages over the reading and control groups in consonant-based word discrimination and in enhanced positive mismatch responses (pMMRs) to lexical tone and musical pitch changes. The improved word discrimination based on consonants correlated with the enhancements in musical pitch pMMRs among the children in the piano group. In contrast, all three groups improved equally on general cognitive measures, including tests of IQ, working memory, and attention. The results suggest strengthened common sound processing across domains as an important mechanism underlying the benefits of musical training on language processing. In addition, although we failed to find far-transfer effects of musical training to general cognition, the near-transfer effects to speech perception establish the potential for musical training to help children improve their language skills. Piano training was not inferior to reading training on direct tests of language function, and it even seemed superior to reading training in enhancing consonant discrimination.

Electroencephalography (EEG) was used in a cross-cultural music study investigating phrase boundary perception. Chinese and German musicians performed a cultural categorization task under Chinese and Western music listening conditions. Western music was the major subject for both groups of musicians, while Chinese music was familiar to Chinese subjects only. By manipulating the presence of pauses between two phrases in the biphrasal melodies, EEG correlates for the perception of phrase boundaries were found in both groups under both music listening conditions. Between 450 and 600 ms, the music CPS (closure positive shift), which had been found in earlier studies with a false tone detection task, was replicated for the more global categorization task and for all combinations of subject group and musical style. At short latencies (100 and 450 ms post phrase boundary offset), EEG correlates varied as a function of musical styles and subject group. Both bottom-up (style properties of the music) and top-down (acculturation of the subjects) information interacted during this early processing stage. IntroductionMusic is a culturally specific phenomenon, which is certainly determined by ethnic background, social environment and traditions. However, the question to what extent the ability to understand and appreciate music is culturally dependent is still controversial. Ethnomusicologists usually assume that extensive experience of music within its cultural context is essential for its basic structural principles to be understood (Blacking, 1973). Lynch and Eilers (1992) explored musical tuning perception in infancy and adulthood and found that adult's perception of musical tuning was culturally specific, and infants between 6 and 12 months of age started to show the same culturally specific performance as adults did. In the same line, Drake and El Heni (2003) proved that acculturation, i.e., the passive exposure to a particular type of music since birth, influenced the perception and cognition of music. On the other hand, some psychological studies have proved the existence of universal, not culturally dependent, aspects of music perception (Castellano et al., 1984;Krumhansl, 1995Krumhansl, , 2000. Drake and Bertrand (2001) reviewed a number of rhythm perception and production studies and concluded that some aspects of temporal processing in music might be universal, in the sense that they function in a similar manner irrespective of an individual's cultural exposure and experience. Likewise, in a study of the cross-cultural emotion perception in music,