The mechanism of speech processing in congenital amusia: evidence from Mandarin speakers.

ABSTRACT: Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder of pitch perception that causes severe problems with music processing but only subtle difficulties in speech processing. This study investigated speech processing in a group of Mandarin speakers with congenital amusia. Thirteen Mandarin amusics and thirteen matched controls participated in a set of tone and intonation perception tasks and two pitch threshold tasks. Compared with controls, amusics showed impaired performance on word discrimination in natural speech and their gliding tone analogs. They also performed worse than controls on discriminating gliding tone sequences derived from statements and questions, and showed elevated thresholds for pitch change detection and pitch direction discrimination. However, they performed as well a

SUBMITTER: Liu F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3275596 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature