An international research provides new insight into the link between language and thought.
One's musical aptitude may be influenced by one's mother language.
Researchers report on April 26 in Current Biology that native speakers of tonal languages have enhanced awareness of melody at the expense of rhythm. An extensive international investigation indicates to the permeation of linguistic competence into other domains of cognition (SN: 3/29/23).
Words in a tonal language are differentiated based on their pitch. In Mandarin Chinese, the word for mother is m, yet the word for horse is mă. Changes in pitch may be used to convey emotion in tonal languages like Spanish, but they do not alter the meaning of individual words.
Jingxuan Liu, a native Mandarin speaker and flutist, pondered the similarities between the two languages and their respective musical traditions. Liu contributed to a research of over half a million individuals from 203 countries, analyzing their musical ability as an undergraduate student in psychology at Duke University. Her coworkers had released a game on the internet in which players had to do a variety of musical tasks, such as matching melodies at varying pitches and locating beat recordings that matched the rhythms of songs.
The native speakers of the 19 depicted tonal languages performed better than the native speakers of the 29 nontonal languages on the melody task. Even yet, the impact was not negligible; the study found that a tonal first language improved melodic awareness by about half as much as music lessons did. Tonal language speakers, on the other hand, performed more poorly on the rhythm challenge.
The human mind has to be selective about the information it processes. This musical trade-off may be explained by the importance of pitch patterns in tonal languages. "You've got a finite resource of attention, and you've got to allocate that somehow," says Courtney Hilton, a cognitive scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and a coauthor on the research.
Previous studies of the relationship between languages and music often only examined two languages, typically English and Cantonese or Mandarin. However, Eastern and Western musical traditions may have influenced the findings. The new research is more generalizable since it examined a larger sample of individuals and included languages that had never been evaluated in this manner before.
"Our result here is showing that the language someone speaks — which is an important part of culture — also shapes cognition," Hilton explains.
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