Effects of Culture on Musical Pitch Perception

Citation: Wong PCM, Ciocca V, Chan AHD, Ha LYY, Tan L-H, et al. ( Effects of Culture on Musical Pitch Perception Patrick C. M. Wong 0 Valter Ciocca 0 Alice H. D. Chan 0 Louisa Y. Y. Ha 0 Li-Hai Tan 0 Isabelle Peretz 0 Alexander Borst, Max-Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Germany 0 1 The Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences & Disorders, and the Knowles Hearing Center, Northwestern University , Evanston , Illinois, United States of America, 2 Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, Northwestern University , Chicago , Illinois, United States of America, 3 School of Audiology and Speech Sciences, University of British Columbia , Vancouver, British Columbia , Canada , 4 Department of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore, 5 School of Humanities, University of Hong Kong , Hong Kong , China , 6 International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), Universite de Montre al , Montreal, Quebec , Canada The strong association between music and speech has been supported by recent research focusing on musicians' superior abilities in second language learning and neural encoding of foreign speech sounds. However, evidence for a double association-the influence of linguistic background on music pitch processing and disorders-remains elusive. Because languages differ in their usage of elements (e.g., pitch) that are also essential for music, a unique opportunity for examining such language-to-music associations comes from a cross-cultural (linguistic) comparison of congenital amusia, a neurogenetic disorder affecting the music (pitch and rhythm) processing of about 5% of the Western population. In the present study, two populations (Hong Kong and Canada) were compared. One spoke a tone language in which differences in voice pitch correspond to differences in word meaning (in Hong Kong Cantonese, /si/ means 'teacher' and 'to try' when spoken in a high and mid pitch pattern, respectively). Using the On-line Identification Test of Congenital Amusia, we found Cantonese speakers as a group tend to show enhanced pitch perception ability compared to speakers of Canadian French and English (non-tone languages). This enhanced ability occurs in the absence of differences in rhythmic perception and persists even after relevant factors such as musical background and age were controlled. Following a common definition of amusia (5% of the population), we found Hong Kong pitch amusics also show enhanced pitch abilities relative to their Canadian counterparts. These findings not only provide critical evidence for a double association of music and speech, but also argue for the reconceptualization of communicative disorders within a cultural framework. Along with recent studies documenting cultural differences in visual perception, our auditory evidence challenges the common assumption of universality of basic mental processes and speaks to the domain generality of culture-to-perception influences. - Funding: This work is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0719666) and the National Institutes of Health (R01DC008333, R21DC007468, R03HD051827, and R21DC009652) awarded to PW, by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canada Institute of Health Research and a Canada Research Chair to IP, and by a grant from College of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University (M58100050), awarded to AHDC. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The present study examines how differences in cultural backgrounds affect the way in which people perceive auditory signals. Specifically, we focus on language, a prominent aspect of culture, and on pitch, a perceptual attribute that not only forms the basic building blocks of music, but also conveys crucial information about talker identity, spoken emotion, and in some instances word meaning (in the case of tone languages). We investigate how speakers of a language in which pitch is used to mark word meaning (Cantonese Chinese speakers) differ from those who do not speak such a language (English and French speakers) when processing musical pitch. Definitions of culture often include systems of communication (e.g., language), visual and performing arts (e.g., music), religions, and social norms [1]. Often excluded from these definitions are basic mental processes, such as sensory perception, memory and attention [2,3]. Interestingly, there is now growing evidence suggesting that some aspects of perceptual processing also differ among people from different societies [46]. Much of the evidence comes from studies of visual recognition memory and eye-tracking, in which participants view pictures with a clear focal object in the context of a background s (...truncated)