The Effect of Musical Experience and Congenital Amusia on Lexical Tone Perception, Production, and Learning: A Review

Adults who are naive to tone languages show a large variability in their ability to perceive, produce, and learn lexical tones, the building blocks of tone languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese. This review will focus on examining the variability from a musical perspective by reviewing behavioural and neuroimaging studies that compare listeners with extensive musical training, listeners with musical disorders such as amusia, and naive/control listeners. Such a comparison allows us to determine whether there are any cross-domain transfer effects, and if so, what aspects in lexical tone perception, production, and learning are affected and why such facilitation or hindrance may occur. Understanding this will not only deepen our understanding of the commonalities and differences between language and music but also have implications for tone language learning. The review concludes with several future directions in this area of research.