Research suggests a tonal mother-tongue boosts melodic perception at the cost of rhythmic ability. 

A study comparing the melodic and rhythmic abilities of almost half a million people speaking 54 different languages found that tonal speakers are better able to discern between subtly different melodies, while non-tonal speakers are better able to tell whether a rhythm is beating in time with the music.

These advantages - in melodic perception for tonal speakers and rhythm perception for non-tonal speakers - were equivalent to about half the boost that a person would have from taking music lessons, the researchers reported in the journal Current Biology.

“We grow up speaking and hearing one or more languages, and we think that experience not only tunes our mind into hearing the sounds of those languages but might also influence how we perceive musical sounds like melodies and rhythms,” says Dr Courtney Hilton, a cognitive scientist at Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland) and Yale who co-led the study.

The research was conducted via The Music Lab, a University of Auckland and Yale collaboration investigating how the human mind creates and perceives music. 

The head of the lab, Dr Samuel Mehr, recently joined the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology.

While non-tonal languages like English might use pitch to inflect emotion or to signify a question, raising or lowering the pitch of a syllable never changes the meaning of a word. 

In contrast, tonal languages like Mandarin use sound patterns to distinguish syllables and words.

Overall, the researchers found that the type of language spoken impacted melodic and rhythmic ability but did not affect people’s capacity to tell whether someone was singing in tune or not. 

“Native speakers across our 19 tonal languages were better on average at discriminating between melodies than speakers of non-tonal languages, and similarly, all 19 were worse at doing the beat-based task,” says Liu.

That tonal speakers have a slight rhythmic disadvantage was a surprise, but the authors think that may be due to a trade-off in attention. 

“It's potentially the case that tonal speakers pay less attention to rhythm and more to pitch, because pitch patterns are more important to communication when you speak a tonal language,” says Hilton.

Speaking a given type of language is no substitute for music lessons, however. 

“Tonal language speakers had a boost in their abilities proportional to about half the boost that you would have on average if you had music lessons,” says Hilton, “but non-tonal language speakers were better at rhythm, and both melody and rhythm are important parts of music.”

The full study is accessible here.