2021.12.15 Dr. ZHANG Caicai

Associate Professor

Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Profile

The speech-music relationship: Insights from congenital amusia (tone deafness)

Speech and music are both evolutionarily old and ubiquitous in human civilizations. Typically deemed as two cognitive domains, speech and music share close parallels including the use of acoustic attributes like pitch and duration. Congenital amusia (commonly known as tone deafness; amusia hereafter), a lifelong neurogenetic disorder of refined musical pitch processing without brain injury, provides an excellent opportunity to understand the relationship of speech and music, and to inform related theories. Despite decades of work, several fundamental aspects about amusia remain controversial, which hinders the development of a full understanding of this disorder and its implications for theories on the speech-music relationship. The debates are revolved around three issues: (1) whether amusia is a domain-specific or domain-general pitch disorder; (2) the neural bases of amusia; and (3) whether amusia is treatable. In this talk I will discuss a series of studies from my lab that probed into these issues, and their implications for understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms of the music-to-speech transfer.

> PDF for review