I could see how the Chinese would be better at relative pitch, but I, too, wonder about perfect pitch. Do Chinese men and women speak in the same pitch? Do men not have lower voices than women? Do all women speak in exactly the same pitch?
And how do you define perfect pitch? In the West you’d ask someone to sing an A, and measure their song against an A on a standard instrument. Do they ask the Chinese to sing an A?
Frylock, are you saying that “really?” is pronounced in the same tone as “really!”?
Person 1: Woohoo, my lottery ticket just hit for $10 million dollars
Person 2: Really?
Person 1: Really!
You have never heard “no shit” as a question of disbelief? As opposed to the “no shit” sherlock “no shit”?
Or do you not hear the rising tone in English to indicate a question and the falling tone to indicate emphaticness (is that a word?)?
As for di-syllabicizing. The Chinese ages ago figured out that a tonal language can be confusing and put 2 syllables together to make it much less ambiguous. Thus, making the tones in Chinese less important than at least the popular press would have one believe.
It’s not the popular press that has led me to believe in the importance of tonality to spoken Chinese, it’s prolonged study of the language itself. The difference is, if you intone “I want to sleep” in English with a pattern not usually associated with a declarative statement, you won’t end up saying something like “I want dumplings,” which could easily happen in Chinese and for which the context would unlikely be a clue to what was really meant.
Chinese has expressive tonalities the way English does as well, but as I tried to say before, they operate on a different level of the language. You could say “Really?” all kinds of ways, but no matter how badly you screw it up you’re never going to end up meaning “Barbecue sauce?” (Note: that confusion doesn’t actually exist in Chinese.)
No, I am saying that the change in tone does not constitute the two as different words. In Chinese, change in tone can result in an entirely different word being spoken. Not so in English.
Again: A lexical meaning is, basically, a dictionary definition. In English, unlike in Mandarin, you will never find a case where, by taking a word and changing its tone, you thereby change its dictionary definition.
In both English and Mandarin, you can use tone to indicate your attitude toward the lexical meaning of your utterance.
In Mandarin but not in English, you can (in fact, you must) use tone to indicate what the lexical meaning of your utterance is.
In English, no matter what tone you use when you say “no shit,” the lexical meaning is “that is a thing worth saying.” In some contexts, depending often (but not always) on the tone, we understand the speaker to mean “no shit” directly–that indeed the thing said was in fact worth saying. In other contexts, as often (but not always) indicated by tone, we understand the speaker to mean it only sarcastically–the thing said was in fact not worth saying. But the lexical meaning is the same in both cases.
Again: Lexical meaning is distinct from the use to which an utterance can be put. I can use the phrase “You are awesome!” to indicate that someone is not awesome. The lexical meaning of the phrase is just an assertion that someone is awesome. But in many contexts, we use that assertion to indicate that the lexical meaning is not true–that the person is not awesome.
You couldn’t understand “you are awesome” as a sarcastic way of saying “you are not awesome” unless you knew the lexical meaning of “you are awesome” plus the conventions we have concerning sarcasm. (Namely, the convention is, when I’m being sarcastic, determine the lexical meaning of my utterance, then take me to be indicating that it’s opposite is in fact true.)
The popular press and I guess the established Linguistic science community, since they all consider Mandarin to be a tonal language and English to not be one.
A tonal language is one which uses tone to make distinctions between lexemes. Mandarin does this, English does not. What this means is, you can supply pairs of Mandarin words (including di-syllabic and multisyllabic words) where the only difference between them is a difference in tone. You can’t do this in English–there’s not even a single such pair.
Actually, you can make “Really?” mean the same as “Barbeque sauce?” in English. It just depends what you mean by meaning. If you look at an entire sentence and what meaning it’s intended to convey in the context of an entire conversation, you can find a case where “Really?” as an entire sentence in that context means just about the same as “Barbeque sauce?”. Consider the following two conversations:
A: Is there anything that I can spread on the poison ivy rash I got today that will make it heal faster?
B: Try using barbeque sauce.
A: Really?
A: Is there anything that I can spread on the poison ivy rash I got today that will make it heal faster?
B: Try using barbeque sauce.
A: Barbeque sauce?
You’re going to say, "But that doesn’t change the lexical meaning of either “really” or “barbeque sauce”. But I’m not talking about the meaning of a single lexical item here. I talking about the meaning of entire sentences and entire conversations. Within the context of the entire conversation, the two sentences that A says in reply to B mean just about the same thing. In the same way, the intonation of an entire sentence does change the meaning of a sentence. Lexical meaning is only one part of the idea of meaning in English. It’s possible to talk about the meaning of an entire sentence in the context of an entire conversation.
Fine, but you’re missing the point. (Am I the only one who finds the phrase “barbecue sauce” somehow hilarious?) Yes, intonation in English will change the meaning of an entire sentence, as it will in any language. But the point we’re making is that in Mandarin as OPPOSED to English, you CAN change the lexical meaning of a single word with the tone, which has different implications for the meaning of the whole sentence, and speaking the language coherently requires sensitivity to this. You screw up the tone of one word, and the sentence “Chinese people like to eat” becomes “Chinese people are tasty,” and there’s no equivalent for that in English.
Anyway, the question was whether people in China were being born with perfect pitch. The answer was no, because perfect pitch isn’t something you’re born with per se, but there was convincing evidence provided for speakers of Chinese (and Vietnamese, so presumably other tonal languages as well) being more likely to develop perfect pitch. The research suggests that this is related to the tonality of the language. Should someone post in Great Debates about the tonality of non-tonal languages?
Exactly right, as I’ve pointed out a few times in the thread already.
In English and Mandarin both, you can change the significance of an utterance by changing its tone.
In Mandaran but not in English, you can change the lexical meaning of a string of phonemes by changing their tone.
Mandarin speaker…
Tones take an English speaker all of an afternoon to figure out. It really is not that foreign or difficult for us. If it were something we didn’t have, it’s be something we could never really “get” and probably wouldn’t be able to hear- like how some Japanese people genuinely cannot hear the difference between “L” and “R.” But tonality comes easily to us…it is one of the easier things about Mandarin to get.
Additionally, there are a lot of regional variations to tonality. Sichuan completely reverse two tones, and some areas add extra tones. I lived next to a town with a mysterious fifth tone. People speak with all kinds of mishmashed tones. I know I did, between formal training in Mandarin, tutoring in Sichuan dialect, and my own half-assedness. But people had no trouble understanding me.
More compelling is the idea that Chinese brings about brain structures related to it being a contextual language. Individual words- spoken or written- are often difficult to distinguish without context, especially if they are at all uncommon. That is something huge for the brain.
Nobody in this thread has yet explained the relationship (if any) between a tonal language and perfect pitch.
I don’t see that anybody has addressed this point - though some pointed out the lack of cites for previous decades to use as comparison - but basically, this is the fallacy of lamarckism: children who learn things* after birth* can’t pass it on in their genes. So the next generation would not be born with more children with perfect pitch.
Secondly, I think this hypothesis completely misses the way China has started training people/ children in the last decades. Why are so many world-class gymnasts or Kung-Fu fighters or whatever coming from China? Because they are of the mindset “We have +1 milliard people, we can choose the bestest of the bestest of the best for our schools, then use incredibly harsh drills for ten years and kick out everybody but the top, and still have thousands of excellent graduates left over at the end of the school”.
I’ve seen some reports about special athletics, dance, Kung Fu schools, and there are thousands of kids, starting at age 5 or 6, training all day long. Only the best are accepted, and they must stay the best to stay on.
In the West, we don’t use those methods, so we don’t produce such quantities of “perfectly drilled” people.
It’s been pointed out that perfect pitch isn’t an inborn ability, and separately someone has provided research that suggests people who speak tonal languages have a greater tendency to acquire perfect pitch. It’s not that my question/hypothesis hasn’t been addressed, but rather corrected.