Global Courant 2023-05-02 00:55:56
Language can affect a person’s ability to recognize musical patterns, according to researchers who analyzed nearly half a million people from 203 countries to understand the connection between language and music.
The study, published in Current Biology, followed a citizen science experiment in which 493,100 participants completed an online game to test their musical skills. Researchers at Yale University selected participants who spoke tonal, pitch-accented, and non-tonal languages.
Tonal languages, such as Mandarin, Igbo, or Cantonese, often place specific tones and sounds on multiple syllables to change the meaning of a single word. While non-tonal languages, such as Arabic, Hindi or French, do not rely so much on pitch to distinguish between words. Pitch-accented languages, such as Japanese, use one syllable per word or focus more on pitch than volume for a word.
Of the participants, 34,034 spoke 19 tonal languages, 16,868 spoke 6 pitch-accented languages, and 442,198 spoke 29 non-tonal languages.
The game had participants perform various musical tests, such as identifying melodies and matching them to certain pitches or finding the right beat to match the rhythm of a song.
This allowed researchers to distinguish that native speakers of tonal languages were able to pick up melodies more than non-tonal native speakers, showing an improvement comparable to half the effect of having music lessons. However, when it came to understanding rhythm, speakers of tonal languages scored worse than their counterparts.
The researchers theorize that native speakers of tonal languages have this advantage because learning a tonal language and practicing music causes the brain to go through a similar learning process to understand different pitches and tones. Learning how to distinguish the syllables in words that are spelled the same can help the brain register multiple melodies in a song.
Nevertheless, there are certain drawbacks that native speakers of tonal languages may have, the study says, as tonal language speakers say they focus more on listening to tones and pitches in words, which often have the smallest changes to create a new word. can distract the brain from picking up on other factors such as rhythm.
According to the study, non-tonal native speakers usually only need to make small changes in pitch to express certain emotions, but they also listen to more obvious cues like the volume in someone’s voice to understand the context, which helps them more likely to have the ability to understand rhythm.
