Re: Personal langs and converse of aux

Hey.

There was a report on NPR last year about some research that
Diana Deutsch did on pitch memory and tone languages. What she
found was that speakers of tone languages (she worked with
Mandarin and Vietnamese, IIRC) will reproduce the precise pitch
on which they pronounce words (within a few cents) even after a
period of several weeks.

In promoting the piece, the announcer said something to the
effect that speakers of tone languages have perfect pitch, but I
don't remember Deutsch tying it to what musicians refer to as
perfect pitch. IMHO, these are two different things.

Dirk

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Herman Miller wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Feb 2001 14:59:40 -0500, Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...> wrote:
>
> >I wonder, does perfect/relative pitch help at all in learning tonal
> >languages, or does it just confuse the issue?  (As someone with perfect
> >pitch I can attest that it *often* confuses the issue in musical things,
> >or maybe I'm just slow!)
> >
> >YHL
>
> I think perfect pitch might help with languages that have level tones. I
> don't think it makes much difference for rising or falling tones, since
> those don't have a fixed pitch to identify. In other words, it might be
> easier for someone with perfect pitch to distinguish between high and low
> level tones, than between high and low tones that are either both rising or
> both falling. Of course, different speakers will use different absolute
> pitches, but it shouldn't be hard to adjust to a particular speaker's set
> of pitches.
>
> --
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--
Dirk Elzinga                          dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu

"The strong craving for a simple formula
has been the undoing of linguists."               - Edward Sapir