Chinese Autism Is The Processing Of Music And Speech Pitch

Music and language appear in every human society. The comparison betweenmusic and speech processing has attracted much attention in recent years since it mayprovide a unique window into understanding human beings. Pitch is a vital element inboth tonal music and speech. Therefore, the comparison between music and speechfrom a perspective of pitch is of important to human beings.Autism is a neuron-developmental disorder referring to social interaction, speechcommunication, and stereotyped behavior. It has been shown that autistics innon-tonal language have superior pitch perception of music, although they show poorperception of speech intonation. Previous studies have selected the congenital amusicsfrom non-tonal language populations as participants, which may minimize the effectthat autistics may have on language ability. To address this, the current study focusedon autistics with Mandarin Chinese, a tonal language. Actually, the incidence ofautism in China is2.38/10000. Due to the research lag and the limited treatment effect,Chinese autistics and their parents are under a lot of mental and social pressure.Based on these, the current study chose mandarin autistics as participants to testtheir pitch perception of music and speech, thus providing evidence for the questionof whether tonal language background can give promotion in the perception of musicand speech. Moreover, examining music and language pitch perception in autism canencourage the process of comparative study of music and speech, and provide areference for autism in the clinical practice of speech rehabilitation therapy.In the current study, we explored the perception of music melody contour andspeech intonation in mandarin autistics. Our study included four experiments.Experiment1examined music melody contour discrimination in mandarin autistics.The results showed that the autistics had normal discrimination of melody contour.Experiment2examined speech intonation discrimination in mandarin autistics. Theresults found that mandarin autistics showed poorer in speech intonationdiscrimination than controls. Experiment3further explored higher level of musicperception in mandarin autistics by examining their music melody contour identification. The results showed that in small pitch interval level, autism groupperformed better than controls, although the main effect of groups was not significantin overall. Experiment4studied identification of speech intonation in mandarinautistics. The results showed mandarin autistics performed worse than controls inidentifying speech intonation.To sum up, this research showed that mandarin autistics performed as well ascontrols in music melody contour discrimination, while they showed better musicperception ability, especially in small pitch interval. Futrhermore, similar to non-tonallanguage autistics, the study also showed that mandarin autistics performed poorer inboth speech intonation discrimination and identification. Compared with non-tonallanguages autistics, mandarin autistics have not shown any better perception in bothmusic and speech. Therefore, the research suggests that tonal language backgroundmay not facilitate perception of music and speech. Music and speech processing maynot share certain neural mechanisms. Moreover, based upon the current data, theeffectiveness of music intervention remains to be further examined.