How Do Tone-Deaf People Speak Tonal Languages?

A few answers about amusia and some questions left unanswered.

Music is everywhere, but not everyone experiences it the same way. Of course, I can’t prove this for sure (since I’m only present in one brain), but here’s an attempt: When a song is stuck in your head (or, when you’re plagued by an “earworm”), what do you hear?

Just as people might experience the “earworm” phenomenon a little differently (some people hear a loop of 15-30 seconds of a song’s hook, while some people go through much more of the song in their head), there is a solid subset of the human population that is plagued with the phenomenon known as “tone deafness.” Are you one of them? Be honest.

Would you make Simon Cowell say, “it’s a no from me”? (To be fair, most of us probably would.)

Formally known as congenital amusia (or just amusia), this condition is found in about 1 in 20 amusic people and manifests itself in an inability to process differences in pitch. This disorder is actually physically found in the brain: amusics’ brain scans have revealed a thinner nerve fiber connection between the right frontal lobe (where higher thinking occurs) and the right temporal lobe (where basic sound processing occurs).

So tone deafness is certainly a real neurogenetic condition. But what are the implications of amusia for people who speak tonal languages, or are trying to learn tonal languages? Is it possible for a tone-deaf person to learn to distinguish different tones for communication purposes? And how do tone-deaf speakers of tonal languages (surely they exist) even function?

Amusic French Speakers and Mandarin

At the very basic level, amusics can certainly struggle with perceiving the differences between words in tonal languages, even though it’s not directly connected to listening to a musical melody.

In a study of French speakers listening to Mandarin¹ (with a control group & a group of amusics), participants were presented with audio of two words in Mandarin and asked to distinguish whether the words were the same or different. The researchers found that while amusic participants generally didn't perform as well as non-amusic people, they actually still scored within the normal range of variation. Among the group of amusic participants, only 3 of the 20 tested (15%) were statistically impaired. So amusics did perform less well than the control group, but the results weren’t as dramatic as you might expect.

Amusic Mandarin Speakers and Mandarin

Interestingly, native speakers of tonal languages also reflect this deficit. In a study that examined native Mandarin speakers’ perception of lexical tones in Mandarin², they found that nearly half of the 22 amusics in the study were impaired. Six of them were considered heavily impaired (what the authors identify as “lexical tone agnosia”) but still displayed normal tone production themselves. This study demonstrated that even people who are exposed from an early age to tonal languages can still experience amusia. And yet, the participants didn't have any language-specific neurological disorders or notable disruptions when it comes to typical language use.

To expand on this, another study of amusic Mandarin speakers³ found that while amusics are less accurate than control group members when it comes to identifying the correct word, syllable, or tone, they are actually still able to track and learn syllable and tone statistical regularities (like when they encounter high-frequency syllables or high-probability tones) with accuracy similar to the control group. So amusics can still keep tabs on some phonological & pitch-related cues and patterns in the language, even if tones themselves are hard to distinguish. (This partially explains why we don’t encounter 1 in 20 Mandarin speakers who are terrible at speaking Mandarin.)

Unanswered Questions

While there are a decent amount of studies that investigate amusic native speakers of tonal languages, I had a bit of trouble finding any studies focusing on amusic L2 language learners of tonal languages who didn’t grow up speaking tonal languages themselves. (Maybe because they’re hard to find? Even at the Mandarin program in my undergraduate school of over 70,000 students, we’d probably only have a few verifiably amusic people. Not a great sample size.) So I’m saddened to report that this remains an somewhat unanswered question.

Generally speaking, though, tonal languages can be difficult to learn for people who didn’t grow up speaking one, even for the most musical of learners. (My father, who spent a year in Taiwan and is a professional musician by trade, still struggles to express the four Mandarin tones! So don’t feel bad if you’re also struggling.)

That being said, I have yet to encounter (or even read a solid description of) an amusic person who is attempting to learn a tonal language. If you are one one of these people or have met one yourself, I would love to hear from you in the comments below. (You can also perform your own experiment by convincing your tone-deaf friend to learn a tonal language with you and see how it goes.) And if you know anyone who matches that description and might be willing to be interviewed, please do send them my way — I would love nothing more than to pick their brain!

So although this newsletter disappointingly doesn’t have as strong of a conclusion as I would hope for (yet), I had fun researching a question that I didn’t know the answer to myself. Hopefully it got you thinking about the many dimensions of language and life in general, and how they can intersect and overlap in intriguing ways.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Tuesday!

1. Nguyen et al. (2009) - Tonal Language Processing in Congenital Amusia

2. Nan et al. (2010) - Congenital Amusia in Speakers of a Tone Language: Association with Lexical Tone Agnosia

3. Zhu et al. (2022) — Individuals With Congenital Amusia Show Degraded Speech Perception but Preserved Statistical Learning for Tone Languages