Absolute Pitch--functional Evidence of Speech-relevant Auditory Acuity

Overview

Journal Cereb Cortex

Publisher Oxford University Press

Specialty Neurology

Date 2009 Jul 14

PMID 19592570

Citations 34

Authors

Mathias S Oechslin

Martin Meyer

Lutz Jancke

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Absolute pitch (AP) has been shown to be associated with morphological changes and neurophysiological adaptations in the planum temporale, a cortical area involved in higher-order auditory and speech perception processes. The direct link between speech processing and AP has hitherto not been addressed. We provide first evidence that AP compared with relative pitch (RP) ability is associated with significantly different hemodynamic responses to complex speech sounds. By systematically varying the lexical and/or prosodic information of speech stimuli, we demonstrated consistent activation differences in AP musicians compared with RP musicians and nonmusicians. These differences relate to stronger activations in the posterior part of the middle temporal gyrus and weaker activations in the anterior mid-part of the superior temporal gyrus. Furthermore, this pattern is considerably modulated by the auditory acuity of AP. Our results suggest that the neural underpinnings of pitch processing expertise exercise a strong influence on propositional speech perception (sentence meaning).

Citing Articles

Conceptual coherence but methodological mayhem: A systematic review of absolute pitch phenotyping.

Bairnsfather J, Mosing M, Osborne M, Wilson S Behav Res Methods. 2025; 57(2):61.

PMID: 39838215 PMC: 11750914. DOI: 10.3758/s13428-024-02577-z.

Auditory temporal resolution and backward masking in musicians with absolute pitch.

Leite Filho C, Rocha-Muniz C, Pereira L, Schochat E Front Neurosci. 2023; 17:1151776.

PMID: 37139520 PMC: 10149789. DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1151776.

The left dorsal stream causally mediates the tone labeling in absolute pitch.

Rogenmoser L, Arnicane A, Jancke L, Elmer S Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2021; 1500(1):122-133.

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A new approach to measuring absolute pitch on a psychometric theory of isolated pitch perception: Is it disentangling specific groups or capturing a continuous ability?.

Germano N, Cogo-Moreira H, Coutinho-Lourenco F, Bortz G PLoS One. 2021; 16(2):e0247473.

PMID: 33617560 PMC: 7899369. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0247473.

Musical Expertise Shapes Functional and Structural Brain Networks Independent of Absolute Pitch Ability.

Leipold S, Klein C, Jancke L J Neurosci. 2021; 41(11):2496-2511.

PMID: 33495199 PMC: 7984587. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1985-20.2020.

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