Your native language could affect your musical ability. A global study comparing the melodic and rhythmic abilities of nearly half a million people speaking 54 different languages found that tonal speakers are better able to discern between subtly different melodies, while non-tonal speakers are better able to tell if a rhythm is beating. in time with the music. The researchers report April 26 in the journal current biology that these advantages, in melodic perception for tonal speakers and rhythm perception for non-tonal speakers, were equivalent to about half the boost you would get from taking music lessons.
“We grow up speaking and hearing one or more languages, and we believe that experience not only tunes our minds to hear the sounds of those languages, but can also influence how we perceive musical sounds, such as melodies and rhythms,” he says. Courtney Hilton, cognitive expert. scientist at the University of Auckland and Yale University and one of the first authors of the paper.
While non-tonal languages like English can use pitch to express an emotion or signify a question, raising or lowering the pitch of a syllable never changes the meaning of a word. By contrast, tonal languages like Mandarin use sound patterns to distinguish syllables and words. “This property requires tonal sensitivity in both speakers and listeners, lest one scold (𝑚𝑎̀) his mother (𝑚𝑎‾) instead of his horse (𝑚&# 119886;̆),” says Jingxuan Liu, a native Mandarin speaker and the study’s other first author, who began working on the project as an undergraduate student at Duke University.
The team conducted a web-based citizen science experiment to test whether speaking a tonal versus a non-tonal language affects people’s musical ability. They recruited nearly half a million participants from 203 countries and native speakers of 54 different languages, including 19 geographically dispersed tonal languages such as Burmese, Punjabi and Igbo.
Participants were given three different musical tasks that tested their ability to discern subtle differences in melody (is this melody the same as the others?), rhythm (does the drum beat in time with the song?) and the perception of fine-grained pitch (Is the vocalist singing in tune?). Depending on how well they performed, the participants were put through increasingly difficult tests, where differences in melody were more subtle, discordant rhythms were almost on the same beat, and off-key voices were closer to being in tune.
Overall, the researchers found that the type of language spoken affected melodic and rhythmic ability, but did not affect people’s ability to tell whether or not someone was singing in tune. “Native speakers of our 19 tonal languages were better on average at discriminating between melodies than speakers of non-tonal languages, and similarly all 19 were worse at doing the rhythm-based task,” says Liu.
That tonal speakers have a slight rhythmic disadvantage was a surprise, but the authors believe it is probably due to a trade-off in attention to different types of acoustic characteristics. “Tonal speakers may pay less attention to rhythm and more to pitch, because pitch patterns are more important for communication when speaking a tonal language,” Hilton says.
This question of whether tonal speakers might have an advantage when it comes to musicality has been explored before, but previous studies were unable to separate linguistic influences from other cultural influences. “Previous studies have mostly only compared speakers of one language to another, usually English versus Mandarin or Cantonese,” Liu says. “English and Chinese speakers also differ in their cultural backgrounds, and possibly in their musical exposure and school training, so it’s very difficult to rule out those cultural factors if only those two groups are compared.”
“We still find this effect even with a wide range of different languages and with speakers who vary greatly in culture and background, which really supports the idea that the difference in musical processing in pitch language speakers is driven by their experience.” of common tonal language”. rather than cultural differences,” Liu says.
“Music has many universals across different cultures, but this paper shows that those universals may underlie inter-individual and cross-cultural variability,” says lead author and cognitive scientist Samuel Mehr of the University of Auckland and Yale University.
However, speaking a certain type of language is not a substitute for music lessons. “Speakers of tonal languages got a boost in their skills proportional to about half the boost you’d get on average if you had music lessons,” says Hilton, “but speakers of non-tonal languages were better at rhythm, and both the both melody and rhythm are important parts of music.
There was variation in musical processing and ability between different tonal languages and between different non-tonal languages, but the authors say further study would be needed to delve into these smaller-scale patterns. Similarly, more research would be needed to understand the mechanisms and developmental pathways behind these differences.
“A big challenge in understanding how humans process the world is breaking down big topics like music or language into its components, like pitch, rhythm, or melody,” says lead author Elika Bergelson, a professor of psychology and a neuroscientist at Duke University. “A second challenge is to sample large enough samples of participants who are diverse enough in their experiences to be able to draw confident conclusions. This work takes an important step in both directions.”
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