Your mother tongue may modify your musical ability.
Tonal languages use pitch to distinguish words that otherwise might sound the same. In Mandarin, for instance, mă means horse whereas mā means mother. Nontonal languages like Spanish sometimes include pitch changes to suggest emotion, for example, but not to change a word’s meaning.
On average, native speakers of the 19 represented tonal languages were better at the melody task compared with speakers of 29 nontonal languages. And the effect wasn’t small — a tonal first language enhanced melodic perception by about half the amount that music lessons did, which was also surveyed. But tonal language speakers tended to be worse at the rhythm task.
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