Liu Fang, Chan Alice H D, Ciocca Valter, Roquet Catherine, Peretz Isabelle, Wong Patrick C M
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Earley Gate, Reading RG6 6AL, United Kingdom.
Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, S637332, Singapore, Singapore.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2016 Jul;140(1):563. doi: 10.1121/1.4955182.
This study investigated pitch perception and production in speech and music in individuals with congenital amusia (a disorder of musical pitch processing) who are native speakers of Cantonese, a tone language with a highly complex tonal system. Sixteen Cantonese-speaking congenital amusics and 16 controls performed a set of lexical tone perception, production, singing, and psychophysical pitch threshold tasks. Their tone production accuracy and singing proficiency were subsequently judged by independent listeners, and subjected to acoustic analyses. Relative to controls, amusics showed impaired discrimination of lexical tones in both speech and non-speech conditions. They also received lower ratings for singing proficiency, producing larger pitch interval deviations and making more pitch interval errors compared to controls. Demonstrating higher pitch direction identification thresholds than controls for both speech syllables and piano tones, amusics nevertheless produced native lexical tones with comparable pitch trajectories and intelligibility as controls. Significant correlations were found between pitch threshold and lexical tone perception, music perception and production, but not between lexical tone perception and production for amusics. These findings provide further evidence that congenital amusia is a domain-general language-independent pitch-processing deficit that is associated with severely impaired music perception and production, mildly impaired speech perception, and largely intact speech production.
本研究调查了以粤语为母语的先天性失歌症患者（一种音高处理障碍）在言语和音乐中的音高感知与产出。粤语是一种声调语言，其声调系统高度复杂。16名讲粤语的先天性失歌症患者和16名对照组人员进行了一系列词汇声调感知、产出、唱歌及心理物理学音高阈值任务。随后，独立听众对他们的声调产出准确性和唱歌熟练度进行评判，并进行声学分析。与对照组相比，失歌症患者在言语和非言语条件下对词汇声调的辨别能力均受损。他们的唱歌熟练度评分也较低，与对照组相比，音高间隔偏差更大，音高间隔错误更多。尽管失歌症患者在语音音节和钢琴音调方面的音高方向识别阈值高于对照组，但他们产出的母语词汇声调的音高轨迹和可懂度与对照组相当。研究发现，音高阈值与词汇声调感知、音乐感知及产出之间存在显著相关性，但失歌症患者的词汇声调感知与产出之间不存在显著相关性。这些发现进一步证明，先天性失歌症是一种不依赖于语言领域的普遍性音高处理缺陷，与严重受损的音乐感知和产出、轻度受损的言语感知以及基本完整的言语产出有关。
