Congenital amusia is a disorder characterized by life-long, selective deficits in the perception of music. This study examined pitch-perception abilities in a group of 10 adults with this disorder. Tests were administered that assessed fine-grained pitch perception by determining thresholds both for the detection of continuous and segmented pitch changes, and for the recognition of pitch direct...

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) demonstrate that human auditory cortical responses are sensitive to changes in static pitch as indexed by the pitch onset response (POR), a negativity generated at the initiation of acoustic periodicity. Yet, it is still unclear if this brain signature is sensitive to dynamic, time-varying properties of pitch more characteristic of those found in naturalist...

SUMMARY The enemy release hypothesis proposes that in parasite depleted habitats, populations will experience relaxed selection and become more susceptible (or less tolerant) to pathogenic infections. Here, we focus on a population of guppies (Poecilia reticulata) that are found in an extreme environment (the Pitch Lake, Trinidad) and examine whether this habitat represents a refuge from parasi...

Ambiguity, and its resolution, are key elements of communication; and, in particular, of music (See, e.g., the examples discussed by L. Bernstein in bis f amous Harvard lectures [1). Besides rhythmical ambiguity, it is particularly harmonic ambiguity of both simultaneaus notes, i.e., chords, and of sequential notes, i.e., rnelodies, that play a major role. Auditory pitch comes into play through...

Abstract: Communicating in tone language involves the use of lexical tone as a cue to determine the meaning of words. Lexical tones are defined both by their pitch height and also by their pitch contours. Given the height component, it has been hypothesized that experience in acquiring a tone language influences the development of a mental template that is used both for speech communication and...

PURPOSE Natural speech comes with variation in pitch, which serves as an important cue for speech recognition. The present study investigated older listeners' dynamic pitch perception with a focus on interindividual variability. In particular, we asked whether some of the older listeners' inability to perceive dynamic pitch stems from the higher susceptibility to the interference from formant c...

Neuroimaging studies of pitch coding seek to identify pitch-related responses separate from responses to other properties of the stimulus, such as its energy onset, and other general aspects of the listening context. The current study reports the first attempt to evaluate these modulatory influences using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures of cortical pitch representations. S...

OBJECTIVE This study focusses on the optimal paradigm for simultaneous assessment of auditory and phonemic discrimination in clinical populations. We investigated (a) whether pitch and phonemic deviants presented together in one sequence are able to elicit mismatch negativities (MMNs) in healthy adults and (b) whether MMN elicited by a change in pitch is modulated by the presence of the phonemi...