Journal Article10.1121/1.2151799
Absolute pitch among American and Chinese conservatory students: prevalence differences, and evidence for a speech-related critical period.
TL;DR: The findings suggest that the potential for acquiring absolute pitch may be universal, and may be realized by enabling infants to associate pitches with verbal labels during the critical period for acquisition of features of their native language.
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Abstract: Absolute pitch is extremely rare in the U.S. and Europe; this rarity has so far been unexplained. This paper reports a substantial difference in the prevalence of absolute pitch in two normal populations, in a large-scale study employing an on-site test, without self-selection from within the target populations. Music conservatory students in the U.S. and China were tested. The Chinese subjects spoke the tone language Mandarin, in which pitch is involved in conveying the meaning of words. The American subjects were nontone language speakers. The earlier the age of onset of musical training, the greater the prevalence of absolute pitch; however, its prevalence was far greater among the Chinese than the U.S. students for each level of age of onset of musical training. The findings suggest that the potential for acquiring absolute pitch may be universal, and may be realized by enabling infants to associate pitches with verbal labels during the critical period for acquisition of features of their native language.
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Cross-domain effects of music and language experience on the representation of pitch in the human auditory brainstem
TL;DR: It is inferred that experience-dependent plasticity of brainstem responses is shaped by the relative saliency of acoustic dimensions underlying the pitch patterns associated with a particular domain.
Age of Acquisition: Its Neural and Computational Mechanisms.
Arturo E. Hernandez,Ping Li +1 more
TL;DR: The authors show how AoA modulates both monolingual lexical processing and bilingual language acquisition and considers the conditions under which syntactic processing and semantic processing may be differentially sensitive to AoA effects in second-language acquisition.
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Tone Language Speakers and Musicians Share Enhanced Perceptual and Cognitive Abilities for Musical Pitch: Evidence for Bidirectionality between the Domains of Language and Music
TL;DR: The notion that tone language speakers and musically trained individuals have higher performance than English-speaking listeners for the perceptual-cognitive processing necessary for basic auditory as well as complex music perception is supported.
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