The Ability Of Emotional Words’ Tone Discrimination In The Amusics With Mandarin Chinese:a ERPs Research

Background:Congenital amusia is a group of people with pitch perception deficit, which cannot be explained by obvious sensory or brain anomalies, low intelligence or lack of environment stimulation to music. As a matter of fact, there is no obvious bad influence on amusics in their daily life; however, it may indicate an underlying anomalous structure of brain. Pitch is not only a determinant attribute of music, but also an important dimension of speech, and people express their emotion by changing the pitch, intensity and rhythm both in music and speech. Mandarin Chinese is a typical tonal language, so Chinese people with amusia may be sensitive to pitch change in speech context.Objective:Based on the above statements, whether the deficit in music perception has already extend to speech in Chinese amusics, whether emotional semantics could compensate this kind of disorder in pitch perception, is still in the air. Therefore, the present study, by comparing amusics with matched controls, will try to find out the mechanism of pitch processing in amusics and the relationship between music and speech.Methods:The groups of amusia and control are selected after MBEA. Then using event-related potential technique, we assessed whether the amusics of Mandarin Chinese have difficulties in discriminating the Chinese emotional words by analyzing the behavioral data and electrophysiological index.Results:There are20in amusics and22in controls. The results reveal that controls perform better in both speech and non-speech stimuli tonal discriminate tasks (speech:p=0.003; non-speech:p=0.012). Furthermore, both groups show better in speech stimuli tonal discriminate task (amusics:p=0.015; controls:0.031). As to ERPs results, the only different between groups in speech stimuli tonal discriminate task occurs in positive slow wave (p=0.024). According to the scalp topography, amusics show an asymmetry in right frontal-central region.Conclusions:1. Chinese amusics show a same pattern as western ones, which could be described as a deficit in pitch perception but not in rhythm and memory;2. Although Chinese amusics are familiar with tonal language, but their pitch perception disorder has extend to speech domain, while the emotional semantics cannot compensate the deficit in pitch perception;3. There is no dysfunction in auditory cortex in amusics, their deficit in pitch perception is related to the lack of investment in cognitive resources;4. The relative location of tonal processing is in frontal-central region.