Page 19 - Fall 2006

a second language. So speakers of nontone languages such as English, who do not have the opportunity to associate pitch- es with meaningful words in infancy, are at a disadvantage for the acquisition of absolute pitch for musical tones.
The evidence for this view has so far been applied only to speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin and Vietnamese, in which pitch is prominently involved in attributing the meaning of words. However, the same princi- ple might also apply to speakers of other Asian languages such as Japanese and certain dialects of Korean. Japanese is a pitch-accent language, in which the meaning of a word can change depending on the pitches of its constituent syllables. For example, in Tokyo Japanese the word “hashi” means “chopsticks” when it is pronounced “high-low,” “bridge” when it is pronounced “low-high,” and “edge” when there is no pitch difference between its constituent syllables. In Korean, the Hamkyeng and Kyensang dialects are considered tonal or pitch accent. For example, in the South Kengsyang dialect, the word “son” means “grandchild” or “loss” when spoken in a low tone, “hand” in a mid tone, and “guest” in a high tone. We may therefore conjecture that there might also exist a higher prevalence of absolute pitch among people who were exposed to these languages or dialects in infancy.
As a related point, in a survey of music students in the United States, it was found that those respondents who des- ignated their ethnic heritage as “Chinese,” “ Japanese” or
“Korean” reported a higher prevalence of absolute pitch than did those who designated their ethnicity as
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The findings from this study therefore point instead to an environmental factor as responsible for the group differences that were obtained, and fit well with the present hypothesis in terms of first lan-
guage acquisition.
Finally, we address the rare instances of absolute pitch
among people who speak an intonation language. Those who were born into families of practicing musicians would have been exposed frequently to pitches associated with their names, and so would have been given the opportunity to acquire absolute pitch in infancy. In the case of people for whom such as explanation is not feasible, we can conjecture that they may have a critical period of unusually long dura- tion, so that it extends to the age at which they can begin formal musical training. It is possible that a predisposition
The authors argued from these findings that ethnicity is a predisposing factor in the acquisition of absolute pitch. However, they omitted to state that the large majority of the Asian respondents had designated an Asian country as their “country of early music education,” and so had presumably spent their early childhood in Asia. On fur- ther analysis, the reported prevalence of absolute pitch was found to be far higher among Asian respondents with early childhood in Asia than among Asians with early childhood
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Caucasian.
in the North American continent.
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Enigma of Absolute Pitch 17
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