60秒科学:Perfect Pitch Related to Language
Can you name those notes? Probably not—perhaps one in 10,000 speakers of European languages has perfect pitch, the ability to recognize a note without having heard any reference note first. But there’s a much better chance you could successfully name the notes if you’re a fluent speaker of an East Asian tonal language, such as Vietnamese, Mandarin 1 or Cantonese. [Cantonese audio clip] That’s the finding of a study by U.C. San Diego and U.S.C. researchers presented May 21st at the Acoustical 2 Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon.
Two hundred three U.S.C. music students listened to musical notes. The Asian musicians who spoke 3 a tone language fluently exhibited almost perfect perfect pitch, far outperforming Caucasians fluent in a nontone language like English. And they also outdid other musicians of Asian ancestry 4 who did not speak a tonal language. So it would seem that perfect pitch is more nurture 5 than nature.
By the way, the notes are D, E and G. Assuming that your MP3 player is in tune 6.
—Steve Mirsky
- Just over one billion people speak Mandarin as their native tongue.大约有十亿以上的人口以华语为母语。
- Mandarin will be the new official language of the European Union.普通话会变成欧盟新的官方语言。
- This system can set up acoustical resonances. 这种系统能产生共鸣。
- The relevance of acoustical principles is by no means limited to sound and hearing. 声学原理并不仅仅适用于声音和听觉。
- They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
- The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。
- Their ancestry settled the land in 1856.他们的祖辈1856年在这块土地上定居下来。
- He is an American of French ancestry.他是法国血统的美国人。
- The tree grows well in his nurture.在他的培育下这棵树长得很好。
- The two sisters had received very different nurture.这俩个姊妹接受过极不同的教育。