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Chinese language sets children to music

28.01.2017

In many modern languages, the meaning of a word depends on the pitch at which it is pronounced; pitch variations of syllables and words can completely change the meaning of what we are talking about. Such languages are called tone languages, and one of the most famous examples is the Mandarin Chinese language, including its variety Putonghua, which is the official language in China, Taiwan and Singapore and which is distinguished four tones. There are also more complex cases, such as Lamnso, the language of the Nso people from Northern Cameroon. Nso communicate with each other already on eight tones, and the meaning of each tone is determined by its variations during the pronunciation of a particular word. It can be assumed that just such languages should be especially closely related to musicality.

This hypothesis was put forward some time ago by psychologists from the University of California at San Diego, who worked with music students. The researchers were trying to understand whether the pitch perception of students whose first language was Chinese is different from the pitch perception of those who speak English from birth. However, at first it was about absolute pitch, that is, the ability to recognize a sound (note) by itself, without interconnection with other sounds.

The scientists did not investigate absolute pitch, but "relative pitch", that is, the ability to determine the pitch of a sound in the context of its neighbors. It is precisely thanks to "relative" hearing that we can, for example, pull up a song after other singers, equaling other people's voices. And the participants of the study this time were not students, but children aged 3-5, some with native Chinese, some with native English. Both were asked to pass several musical tests to recognize the pitch of sounds and their timbre.

As a result, it turned out that both hear the timbre in the same way, but the pitch is different: children with native Chinese felt the pitch better than children with native English. Obviously, both speech skills and musical abilities do not develop in our brain separately, not independently of each other, but, let's say, in close cooperation - "language" affects "music".

However, it does not at all follow from this that a child who studies music must by all means begin to learn some tone language. Music is not only the difference between "la" and the note "si", it is also timbres, rhythms and a mass of syntactic rules by which any piece of music lives. So in order to know and understand music better, you need to deal with it; although it is worth noting that an additional foreign language has never bothered anyone.

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