Do-Re-Oui? How your native language may impact your musical abilities

By Melissa Lopez-Martinez/CTVNews.ca Writer

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    Toronto, Ontario (CTV Network) — Language may 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 where 493,100 participants completed an online game to test their musical abilities. Researchers at Yale University sought out participants who spoke tonal, pitch-accented and non-tonal languages.

Tonal languages, like 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, like Arabic, Hindi or French, don’t rely as much on pitch to differentiate between words. Pitch-accented languages like Japanese will use one syllable per word or focus more on pitch rather 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 complete various musical tests like identifying melodies and matching them to certain pitches or finding the correct beat to match a song’s rhythm.

Through this, researchers were able to distinguish that native speakers of tonal languages were able to pick up on melodies more than non-tonal native speakers, showing an improvement comparable to half the effect of having had music lessons. However, when it came to understanding rhythm, speakers of tonal-languages scored poorer 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 differentiate the syllables in words that are spelled the same can help the brain register multiple melodies in a song.

Nonetheless, there are certain disadvantages native speakers of tonal-languages can have, the study says, as the researchers say since tonal-language speakers focus more listening for tones and pitches in words, that often have the slightest changes to create a new word, can distract the brain from picking up on other factors like rhythm.

According to the study, non-tonal native speakers usually only have to make small pitch changes to express certain emotion but they also listen for more obvious cues like volume in a person’s voice to understand the context, making them more likely to have the ability to understand rhythm.

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