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.
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.
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. 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.
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