A number of the world’s languages, most famously the Chinese languages, are tonal. Meaning is derived as much from the rising, falling, or steady level of the pitch as it is from the consonant or vowel sounds used. But as I understand tone deafness, what a tone deaf person lacks is the ability to distinguish one pitch from another or identify their relative levels. Does this mean that tone deafness in a native speaker of a tonal language is a major communication handicap? Would a Chinese person, raised in China, find it difficult to speak and understand their own language if they couldn’t distinguish relative tones? Or am I confusing two different senses of “tone”?
Tone deafness is a strange disorder. It affects the brain’s processing of musical pitches (so the tone-deaf person cannot differentiate relative pitches) but generally appears to have no effect on interpreting intonation in human languages. So Chinese tone-deaf people are able to function normally, language-wise.
I think: linguistic and musical functions are in opposite hemispheres of the brain. So, a right hemisphere impairment in the perception of music would not affect left hemisphere activation when tone-based words are heard, so little impairment would be heard.
Or, if there is a link, then this disorder is probably still rarer in these societies because they are hearing tones from an early age. Kind of like how rates of some dyslexias are common in English and French speakers (few pronunciation cues) but very rare in Japanese (characters strongly correspond with pronunciation).
No. Tone deafness can prevent a person from hearing the differences between musical notes, but tonal languages deal with the inflection. You only have to identify a rising or falling tone, not the actual note it represents.
In English, the difference can be represented in the different tones in “great” meant honestly and “great” meant sarcastically.
Even a tone-deaf person can recognize a song by its tones even if they can’t tell you whether the pitch is rising or falling, and they can sing a reasonable facsimile of a song with the pitch going up or down in the right direction.