Impaired talker rocognition in Mandarin-speaking congenital amusics

Abstract

The speech signal contains at least two types of information: the linguistic information and a talker’s voice. In this study we examined how congenital amusia, a pitch-processing disorder, affects the recognition of talkers’ voices. Twenty Mandarins peaking amusics and 20 controls were tested on talker recognition in four types of contexts that varied in language familiarity: Mandarin real words, Mandarin pseudowords, Arabic words and reversed Mandarin speech. We found that the deficit in amusia affects talker recognition in that amusics demonstrated degraded performance in both native language conditions that contain phonological cues to facilitate talker recognition and non-native conditions where talker recognition primarily relies on phonetics cues including pitch. Altogether, the results suggested that the scope of amusia is beyond the pitch-related processing in linguistic dimension, but also extends to the talker dimension in speech signal.