Subject: Re: infants and pitch From: Alex Francis <francisa(at)PURDUE.EDU> Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 20:07:10 -0500Rather than providing a basis for maintaining some kind of pre-linguistic absolute pitch perception, I think it could easily be argued that early exposure to a tonal language, at least one with more than one phonetically level tone (e.g. Thai, Cantonese), would promote the development of a strongly relative (talker dependent) perception of voice pitch. See Francis, A.L., Ciocca, V.C., & Ng, B.K.C. (2003). On the (non)categorical perception of lexical tones. Perception & Psychophysics, 65(6), 1029-1044. Wong, P. C. M., and Diehl, R. L. (2003) Perceptual Normalization for Inter- and Intra-Talker Variation in Cantonese Level Tones. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 46, 413-421. I'm not really sure how this fits with the Deutsch article posted recently, as that was on production of single words in a list from languages that do not have multiple level tones, while the work on talker normalization of tone involves the perception of tokens within sentences, from languages with multiple level tones (that is, lexical tones distinguished primarily by their relative height within the talker's pitch range). -alex Annemarie Seither-Preisler wrote: >The findings by Saffran appear to be very revealing in this respect, >showing that young infants at the age of 8 months, unlike adults, >primarily rely on absolute pitch cues. > >Saffran, J. R. & Griepentrog, G. J. Absolute pitch in infant auditory >learning: evidence for developmental reorganization. Dev Psychol 37, 74-85 >(2001). >Saffran, J. R. Musical Learning and Language Development. Ann NY Acad Sci >999, 397-401 (2003). > >In summary, these results suggest that absolute pitch is a primary >perceptual mode that is heavily superseded by relative pitch (probably in >the course of language acquisition). Early musical training or learning a >tonal language like Thai or Japanese may help to prevent this edging >out-process, with the consequence that certain subjects retain the ability >to perceive absolute pitch throughout life. Verbal categorizations of >notes may be helpful in this respect, but it would be misleading to take >them for the main underlying cause. Alexander L. Francis http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~francisa Assistant Professor francisA(at)purdue.edu Audiology and Speech Sciences ofc. +1 (765) 494-3815 Purdue University lab. +1 (765) 494-7553 500 Oval Drive fax. +1 (765) 494-0771 West Lafayette IN 47907-2038 USA ------------my employer requires the following addendum------------ CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This email and the documents accompanying this email may contain legally privileged confidential information. The information is intended only for the use of the individual or entity named as recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, reproduction or distribution of this email or its attachments, or the taking of any action in reliance on the contents of this email or its attachments, is strictly prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender by return email.