Individuals with congenital amusia imitate pitches more accurately in singing than in speaking: Implications for music and language processing

Liu, Fang; Jiang, Cunmei; Pfordresher, Peter Q.; Mantell, James T.; Xu, Yi; Yang, Yufang

doi:10.3758/s13414-013-0506-1

Cited by 32 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Given that amusia has been characterized as a deficit of awareness (Paquette, Goulet, & Rothermich, 2013;Peretz, Brattico, J€ arvenp€ a€ a, & Tervaniemi, 2009), the level of explicit awareness of pitch information required for the task may play an important role. However, many studies have reported mixed results regarding whether amusics find direction tasks more difficult than detection tasks (Liu et al, 2013;Liu et al, 2010;Williamson, Liu, Peryer, Grierson, & Stewart, 2012), and the weight of the evidence here indicates that amusics have equal difficulty with change detection and direction tasks. Additionally, all the tasks assessed by our meta-analysis were explicit ones, and it may be that a small difference in degree of explicitness is not enough to elicit effect size differences between change detection and direction tasks across studies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

“…The application of all selection criteria resulted in the inclusion of 43 unique articles. One of these articles (Liu et al, 2013) was dropped from the database because it reported the same pitch threshold data (for the same set of participants) as another article that was already included ).…”

Section: Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria For Databasementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In other words, the amusic deficit has been proposed to lie in the acoustic analysis of sounds, and since music processing lies downstream from acoustic processing and makes high demands on fine-grained pitch resolution, amusics manifest a musical impairment. The literature has since been converging towards the finding that amusics display significantly worse pitch discrimination performance as compared to controls (e.g., Hutchins, Gosselin, & Peretz, 2010;Jiang, Hamm, Lim, Kirk, & Yang, 2010;Liu, Patel, Fourcin, & Stewart, 2010;Jiang et al, 2012;Liu et al, 2013;Nan, Sun, & Peretz, 2010;Omigie & Stewart, 2011;Patel, Wong, Foxton, Lochy, & Peretz, 2008;Tillmann, Burnham, et al, 2011;Tillmann, Rusconi, et al, 2011), bearing out Peretz et al's (2002) hypothesis. Indeed, in addition to poor performance on the MBEA, a pitch discrimination deficit has become a diagnostic benchmark for the identification of new amusic cases.…”

mentioning

confidence: 90%

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

Vuvan

Nunes-Silva

Peretz

2015

Cortex

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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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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 55%

Section: Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria For Databasementioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 90%

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

Vuvan

Nunes-Silva

Peretz

2015

Cortex

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“…Nevertheless, difficulties with music are not the only characteristics of individuals with amusia (amusics). Studies have shown that the perception and production of pitch changes in the linguistic domain may likewise be problematic for amusics, although to a less pronounced extent (e.g., Patel et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2010;Tillmann et al, 2011a;Liu et al, 2012;Thompson et al, 2012;Liu et al, 2013). However, the precise nature of amusia, or rather, of the deficits that underlie amusia, is not well understood.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Accordingly, a domain-general point of view has been used to explain amusics' pitch perception deficits in both music and language. Indeed, the abilities of amusics to perceive pitch and to control pitch production are poorer than their non-amusics counterparts, especially when the pitch variation is comparatively small, e.g., intonation contours (Patel et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2010;Hutchins and Peretz, 2012;Liu et al, 2012), lexical tones (Nguyen et al, 2009;Nan et al, 2010;Tillmann et al, 2011a;Liu et al, 2012;Liu et al, 2013), as well as the prosodic cues associated with specific emotional states . a) Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Phonological processing in Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia

Wang

Peng

2014

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Although there is an emerging consensus that both musical and linguistic pitch processing can be problematic for individuals with a developmental disorder termed congenital amusia, the nature of such a pitch-processing deficit, especially that demonstrated in a speech setting, remains unclear. Therefore, this study tested the performance of native Mandarin speakers, both with and without amusia, on discrimination and imitation tasks for Cantonese level tones, aiming to shed light on this issue. Results suggest that the impact of the phonological deficit, coupled with that of the domain-general pitch deficit, could provide a more comprehensive interpretation of Mandarin amusics' speech impairment. Specifically, when there was a high demand for pitch sensitivity, as in fine-grained pitch discriminations, the operation of the pitch-processing deficit played the more predominant role in modulating amusics' speech performance. But when the demand was low, as in discriminating naturally produced Cantonese level tones, the impact of the phonological deficit was more pronounced compared to that of the pitch-processing deficit. However, despite their perceptual deficits, Mandarin amusics' imitation abilities were comparable to controls'. Such selective impairment in tonal perception suggests that the phonological deficit more severely implicates amusics' input pathways.

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Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are impaired in absolute but not relative pitch and duration matching in speech and song imitation

et al. 2021

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Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit atypical imitation. However, few studies have identified clear quantitative characteristics of vocal imitation in ASD. This study investigated imitation of speech and song in English‐speaking individuals with and without ASD and its modulation by age. Participants consisted of 25 autistic children and 19 autistic adults, who were compared to 25 children and 19 adults with typical development matched on age, gender, musical training, and cognitive abilities. The task required participants to imitate speech and song stimuli with varying pitch and duration patterns. Acoustic analyses of the imitation performance suggested that individuals with ASD were worse than controls on absolute pitch and duration matching for both speech and song imitation, although they performed as well as controls on relative pitch and duration matching. Furthermore, the two groups produced similar numbers of pitch contour, pitch interval‐, and time errors. Across both groups, sung pitch was imitated more accurately than spoken pitch, whereas spoken duration was imitated more accurately than sung duration. Children imitated spoken pitch more accurately than adults when it came to speech stimuli, whereas age showed no significant relationship to song imitation. These results reveal a vocal imitation deficit across speech and music domains in ASD that is specific to absolute pitch and duration matching. This finding provides evidence for shared mechanisms between speech and song imitation, which involves independent implementation of relative versus absolute features. Lay Summary Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit atypical imitation of actions and gestures. Characteristics of vocal imitation in ASD remain unclear. By comparing speech and song imitation, this study shows that individuals with ASD have a vocal imitative deficit that is specific to absolute pitch and duration matching, while performing as well as controls on relative pitch and duration matching, across speech and music domains.

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Individuals with congenital amusia imitate pitches more accurately in singing than in speaking: Implications for music and language processing

Cited by 32 publications

References 60 publications

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

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

Phonological processing in Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are impaired in absolute but not relative pitch and duration matching in speech and song imitation

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