Categorical perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics

Previous research suggests that within Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics, only a subgroup has behavioral lexical tone perception impairments (tone agnosia), whereas the rest of amusics do not. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the categorical nature of lexical tone perception in...

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Main Authors:	Huang, Wan-Ting, Liu, Chang, Dong, Qi, Nan, Yun
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Frontiers Media S.A. 2015
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4468354/

id	pubmed-4468354
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-44683542015-07-01 Categorical perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics Huang, Wan-Ting Liu, Chang Dong, Qi Nan, Yun Psychology Previous research suggests that within Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics, only a subgroup has behavioral lexical tone perception impairments (tone agnosia), whereas the rest of amusics do not. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the categorical nature of lexical tone perception in Mandarin-speaking amusics with and without behavioral lexical tone deficits. Three groups of listeners (controls, pure amusics, and amusics with tone agnosia) participated in tone identification and discrimination tasks. Indexes of the categorical perception (CP) of a physical continuum of fundamental frequencies ranging from a rising to level tone were measured. Specifically, the stimulus durations were manipulated at 100 and 200 ms. For both stimulus durations, all groups exhibited similar categorical boundaries. The pure amusics showed sharp identification slopes and significantly peaked discrimination functions similar to those of normal controls. However, such essential characteristics for the CP of lexical tones were not observed in amusics with tone agnosia. An enlarged step-size from 20 to 35 Hz was not able to produce any discrimination peaks in tone agnosics either. The current study revealed that only amusics with tone agnosia showed a lack of categorical tone perception, while the pure amusics demonstrated typical CP of lexical tones, indicating that the deficit of pitch processing in music does not necessarily result in the deficit in the CP of lexical tones. The different performance between congenital amusics with and without tone agnosia provides a new perspective on the proposition of the relationship between music and speech perception. Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-06-16 /pmc/articles/PMC4468354/ /pubmed/26136714 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00829 Text en Copyright © 2015 Huang, Liu, Dong and Nan. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Huang, Wan-Ting Liu, Chang Dong, Qi Nan, Yun
spellingShingle	Huang, Wan-Ting Liu, Chang Dong, Qi Nan, Yun Categorical perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics
author_facet	Huang, Wan-Ting Liu, Chang Dong, Qi Nan, Yun
author_sort	Huang, Wan-Ting
title	Categorical perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics
title_short	Categorical perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics
title_full	Categorical perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics
title_fullStr	Categorical perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics
title_full_unstemmed	Categorical perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics
title_sort	categorical perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics
description	Previous research suggests that within Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics, only a subgroup has behavioral lexical tone perception impairments (tone agnosia), whereas the rest of amusics do not. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the categorical nature of lexical tone perception in Mandarin-speaking amusics with and without behavioral lexical tone deficits. Three groups of listeners (controls, pure amusics, and amusics with tone agnosia) participated in tone identification and discrimination tasks. Indexes of the categorical perception (CP) of a physical continuum of fundamental frequencies ranging from a rising to level tone were measured. Specifically, the stimulus durations were manipulated at 100 and 200 ms. For both stimulus durations, all groups exhibited similar categorical boundaries. The pure amusics showed sharp identification slopes and significantly peaked discrimination functions similar to those of normal controls. However, such essential characteristics for the CP of lexical tones were not observed in amusics with tone agnosia. An enlarged step-size from 20 to 35 Hz was not able to produce any discrimination peaks in tone agnosics either. The current study revealed that only amusics with tone agnosia showed a lack of categorical tone perception, while the pure amusics demonstrated typical CP of lexical tones, indicating that the deficit of pitch processing in music does not necessarily result in the deficit in the CP of lexical tones. The different performance between congenital amusics with and without tone agnosia provides a new perspective on the proposition of the relationship between music and speech perception.
publisher	Frontiers Media S.A.
publishDate	2015
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4468354/
_version_	1613236045365641216

Categorical perception of lexical tones in mandarin-speaking congenital amusics

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