Song Imitation in Congenital Amusia

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of pitch perception that may also compromise production. Despite amusics’ long documented difficulties with pitch, previous evidence suggests familiar music have an implicit facilitative effect on their performance. It remains, however, unknown whether vocal imitation song in influenced by melody familiarity and the presence lyrics. To address this issue, thirteen Mandarin speaking amusics 13 matched controls imitated novel segments lyrics syllable /la/. Eleven out these participants each group song. Subsequent acoustic analysis was conducted to measure timing matching accuracy based eight measures. While showed worse performance than across seven measures, found favorable three pitch-related The did not affect either group’s substantially. Correlations were observed between Montreal Battery Evaluation Amusia We discuss implications terms familiarity, memory demands, relevance lexical information, link