CNRS, UMR5022, Laboratoire d'Etude de l'Apprentissage et du Développement, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France; Institut Universitaire de France, Paris, France.
Published: October 2014
AI Article Synopsis
Article Abstract
Congenital amusia has been described as a lifelong deficit of music perception and production, notably including amusic individuals' difficulties to recognize a familiar tune without the aid of lyrics. The present study aimed to evaluate whether amusic individuals might have acquired long-term knowledge of familiar music, and to test for the minimal amount of acoustic information necessary to access this knowledge (if any) in amusia. Segments of familiar and unfamiliar instrumental musical pieces were presented with increasing duration (250, 500, 1000 msec etc.), and participants provided familiarity judgments for each segment. Results showed that amusic individuals succeeded in differentiating familiar from unfamiliar excerpts with as little acoustic information as did control participants (i.e., within 500 msec). The findings reveal that amusic individuals have stored musical pieces in long-term memory (LTM), and, together with other recent findings, they suggest that congenital amusia might impair conscious access to music processing rather than music processing per se.
Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada; International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research (BRAMS), University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Electronic address:
Humans have the spontaneous capacity to track the beat of music. Yet some individuals show marked difficulties. To investigate the neural correlates of this condition known as beat deafness, the cortical electric activity of ten beat-deaf adults, the largest cohort studied so far, as well as of 14 matched controls (Experiment 2), and 16 university students (Experiment 1) were examined.
Brain imaging research shows that congenital amusia in non-tonal language speakers has neural deficits in the connectivity between the auditory cortex and the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG).
This study explored the functional connectivity (FC) related to amusia in Mandarin speakers using resting-state fMRI, revealing increased connectivity in specific temporal regions but reduced connectivity between Heschl's gyri (HG) and IFG.
The findings link music perception issues in amusia with altered connectivity patterns, showing that lower music perception scores correspond to weaker connectivity between the left HG and right IFG in Mandarin speakers.
Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits of music perception and production, which are related to altered pitch processing. The present study used a wide variety of tasks to test potential patterns of processing impairment in individuals with congenital amusia (N = 18) in comparison to matched controls (N = 19), notably classical pitch processing tests (i.e.
Unité de Recherche en Neurosciences Cognitives (Unescog), Center for Research in Cognition & Neurosciences (CRCN), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium.
The present longitudinal study investigated the hypothesis that early musical skills (as measured by melodic and rhythmic perception and memory) predict later literacy development via a mediating effect of phonology. We examined 130 French-speaking children, 31 of whom with a familial risk for developmental dyslexia (DD). Their abilities in the three domains were assessed longitudinally with a comprehensive battery of behavioral tests in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade.
