Cracking the Pitch Code in Music and Language: Insights from Congenital Amusia and Autism Spectrum Disorders

Project Information

CAASD

Grant agreement ID: 678733

DOI

10.3030/678733

Project closed

EC signature date 25 November 2016

Start date 1 December 2016

End date 31 May 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 488 814,00

EU contribution

€ 1 488 814,00

Coordinated by

THE UNIVERSITY OF READING
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CAASD (Cracking the Pitch Code in Music and Language: Insights from Congenital Amusia and Autism Spectrum Disorders)

Reporting period: 2021-06-01 to 2023-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Pitch is ubiquitous in our everyday listening experiences. Embedded in countless sound events, pitch carries the frequency information of sound that enables us to understand language, appreciate music, and navigate our environment. Despite its necessity, the ability to process pitch in different stimuli varies across individuals, with moderating factors including intelligence, age, memory, music aptitude, tone language background, as well as other individual differences as seen in atypical populations such as congenital amusia (CA) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Taking an interdisciplinary, multimethodological and integrated approach, the CAASD project aimed to uncover the underlying mechanisms of pitch processing in music and language through comparative studies of CA and ASD, two neurodevelopmental conditions demonstrating intriguing differences in music, language, emotion, pitch, memory, and cognitive processing.

Specifically, we addressed the following three aims by conducting a series of behavioural and EEG experiments to examine the cognitive and neural bases of music, language, and emotion processing in CA and ASD, and how tone language background influences those characteristics.

Aim 1: To elucidate the differences in speech, music, and emotional processing in CA and ASD, and how and to what extent pitch processing and cognitive abilities impact these differences.

Aim 2: To pinpoint the neurophysiological origins of speech and musical processing characteristics in CA and ASD.

Aim 3: To determine the impact of language background (Mandarin versus English) on communicative abilities of ASD individuals.

The findings from the CAASD project have important theoretical, societal, and clinical implications. First, our work contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms of music and language processing, two uniquely human cognitive functions present in every society that fascinate numerous scientists across multiple disciplines. Secondly, our research helps shed light on various daily experiences by different people in society, including speech communication, music listening, and auditory sensitivity, and how and why these different experiences may occur across individuals. Finally, our findings have implications for therapeutic purposes, e.g. using music-assisted programmes for language learning in ASD, a feasibility trial we conducted for our ERC Proof of Concept grant, MAP, 838787. We have also used linguistic redescription-associate learning to improve musical structural processing in CA.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Over the course of the project, the CAASD lab hosted over 75 trainees, ranging from postdocs and PhD students to speech and language therapists, as well as MSc and undergraduate project/placement students, part-time research assistants, and work experience students. Together, the team conducted in-lab experiments with over 450 English-speaking participants in the UK, 200 Mandarin-speaking participants in China, and 40 Cantonese-speaking participants in Hong Kong. More than 1200 people also took part in our online survey and behavioural studies. At the time of writing, the CAASD team and collaborators have published 27 peer-reviewed journal articles and generated two preprints and two datasets, with 11 additional manuscripts under revision/review or in preparation and 18 remaining datasets to be processed, analysed, and written up. The results have been presented at over 80 national and international events, workshops, and conferences.

Findings from our behavioural studies (Aim 1) highlight the importance of taking an individual differences approach to understand pitch processing as modulated by cognitive abilities. While we observed domain-general performance on pitch, music, language and emotion processing in CA and ASD in some tasks, dissociable performance between music and language domains was also found in other tasks as well as on emotion recognition across various visual and auditory communicative domains.

Findings from our EEG studies (Aim 2) suggest that neural responses of ASD and CA individuals to musical/emotional stimuli may depend on timescale of the stimuli (local vs. global) and stimulus type (natural music vs. pitch direction). Although CA individuals show diminished neural responses while processing emotions in chords and harmonic and melodic structure in music, their difficulties with musical structural processing may be meliorated through a redescription-associate training method.

Through cross-linguistic studies of Mandarin, Cantonese, and English speakers (Aim 3), we found intriguing similarities and differences in performance across individuals with different language backgrounds on a range of tasks, including mental representations of pitch contours, form/function processing of pitch, speech/song imitation, emotion recognition in speech, song, faces, and face-like objects, immediate repetition of spoken versus sung material, and musical and linguistic prediction.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Taking an interdisciplinary, multimethodological and integrated approach, the CAASD project examined various cognitive, neural, and emotional processes in music and language, by investigating the relationships between the brain and behaviour, music and language processing, tone and non-tonal languages, and theoretical and practical implications. In particular, we used a wide range of state-of-the-art experimental paradigms in our behavioural and EEG studies, including cross-modal affective priming, semantic priming, speech/song imitation, sentence repetition, category learning, adaptive tracking pitch thresholds, psychophysical reverse correlation, melodic/sentence cloze task, and neural signal processing.

Among many of our findings, our results on the mental representations of pitch contours, pitch and cognitive processing, speech and song imitation, and perceptual adaptation of speech categories advanced the research field of music, language, and the brain beyond the state of the art in significant ways. Firstly, we advocate applying advanced technologies in the studies of music and language processing, e.g. using reverse-correlation to uncover mental representations of speech and musical contours. Secondly, it is important to take an individual differences approach to understanding characteristics of pitch, music, and language processing among different populations. Thirdly, our findings from music and language processing also have implications for theories and practice regarding social communication and social interactions, especially considering the role of music in promoting collective interactions and social bonding. Finally, there are intimate links between individuals’ pitch, cognitive, music, language, and reading abilities. Examining the mechanisms of music and language processing would benefit from investigating a range of populations, including CA, ASD, dyslexia, William syndrome, musicians, non-musicians, tone language speakers, individuals from different cultures, an approach we have adopted through collaborations across the globe.

Using CA and ASD as a theoretical and experimental challenge, we have taken the research on music and language processing beyond the status quo by producing a variety of empirical data (acoustic spoken/sung data, perceptual measures, and brain waves) and uncovering the underlying mechanisms of the human music and language cognition.

CAASD project postcard

CAASD lab logo