Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Sci Rep. 2017 Mar 13;7:44285. doi: 10.1038/srep44285.
Research suggests that musical skills are associated with phonological abilities. To further investigate this association, we examined whether phonological impairments are evident in individuals with poor music abilities. Twenty individuals with congenital amusia and 20 matched controls were assessed on a pure-tone pitch discrimination task, a rhythm discrimination task, and four phonological tests. Amusic participants showed deficits in discriminating pitch and discriminating rhythmic patterns that involve a regular beat. At a group level, these individuals performed similarly to controls on all phonological tests. However, eight amusics with severe pitch impairment, as identified by the pitch discrimination task, exhibited significantly worse performance than all other participants in phonological awareness. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that pitch discrimination thresholds predicted phonological awareness beyond that predicted by phonological short-term memory and rhythm discrimination. In contrast, our rhythm discrimination task did not predict phonological awareness beyond that predicted by pitch discrimination thresholds. These findings suggest that accurate pitch discrimination is critical for phonological processing. We propose that deficits in early-stage pitch discrimination may be associated with impaired phonological awareness and we discuss the shared role of pitch discrimination for processing music and speech.
研究表明，音乐技能与语音能力有关。为了进一步探究这种关联，我们考察了在音乐能力较差的个体中是否存在语音障碍。20 名先天性失歌症患者和 20 名匹配的对照组在纯音音高辨别任务、节奏辨别任务和四项语音测试中接受了评估。失歌症患者在辨别音高和辨别涉及规则节拍的节奏模式方面存在缺陷。在群体水平上，这些个体在所有语音测试中的表现与对照组相似。然而，8 名在音高辨别任务中被确定为音高损伤严重的失歌症患者，在语音意识方面的表现明显逊于所有其他参与者。分层回归分析表明，音高辨别阈值在语音短期记忆和节奏辨别预测之外，还能预测语音意识。相比之下，我们的节奏辨别任务并不能在音高辨别阈值预测之外预测语音意识。这些发现表明，准确的音高辨别对于语音处理至关重要。我们提出，早期阶段音高辨别缺陷可能与语音意识受损有关，并讨论了音高辨别在处理音乐和言语方面的共同作用。
