The very first cry of neonates is marked by their maternal language. This seems to be especially apparent in tonal languages, where pitch and pitch fluctuation determine the meaning of words. Chinese ...

Your mother tongue may modify your musical ability. Speaking a native language that requires tones appears to boost perception of melody, but at the cost of rhythm, researchers report April 26 in ...

More of the brain is busy processing pitch from language and other sounds than previously thought, according to a researcher in neurophonetics at Purdue University. "By studying brain activity at ...

Could it be that cellist Yo-Yo Ma owes his perfect musical pitch to his Chinese parents? While we may never know the definitive answer, new research from the University of California, San Diego has ...

Lexical tones, which involve specific pitch contours that differentiate word meanings, are fundamental to tonal languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese. In both languages, subtle variations in pitch, ...