Writing about David Rock, Steven Pinker, Lakoff and Johnson in one article got me all excited today.  Now, per my typical school year routine, I am sitting in my son’s Friday night Chinese school class.

From a grammar perspective, Mandarin Chinese is much simpler than the romance languages.  Everything is subject-verb-object.  Even better, the hangover I had from my studies of French was instantly cured when I discovered the Chinese don’t conjugate verbs.  They don’t do it regularly or irregularly.  They don’t do it at all.  I am; you am; he/she/it am; we am; you am; they am.

The trickiest part of learning Mandarin Chinese — or Cantonese or Taiwanese or any of the other dialects for that matter — is learning how to pronounce the pitches correctly.  If you say tang with a singing, flat tone it means “soup” (湯).  A rising tone means “sugar” (糖).  In English, we give a rising tone to the end of our questions.  On my first day in China as a student in 1997, I went to a restaurant and nervously tried to order “soup” (糖).  Some amount of consternation followed, and then a plate of granulated white sugar was finally delivered to me.  This is when I realized my professors were really not kidding when they said we had to learn how to hear and speak the tones.

How did this happen?  The best answer I’ve found was in a piece by John McWhorter in The Atlantic Monthly.  He explains that two words that differ in both consonance and pitch can eventually metamorphosize (he uses the felicitous analogy of the Cheshire Cat) into two words with identical consonance, but different pitch.  He explains this may be something like Cockney’s abbreviation of “breath” and “thing” to “bref” and “fing”.

Now, I will play at being David Rock.  What kind of brain science do we have to explain the mysterious presence of tonal languages in various places around the globe: “East and Southeast Asia; sub-Saharan Africa; and among the indigenous communities of Mexico” (McWhorter)?  I’ll mention a BBC News article later in my post, but for now let’s focus the question by zeroing in on music.  It turns out that brain scientists know something interesting about how tonal languages relate to musical pitch sensitivity.

Scientific American and The New York Times both covered research by Dr.Diana Deutsch, who suggests that,

“for students who speak a tonal language, acquiring absolute pitch is like learning a second language, which becomes much more difficult after a critical period of development. For students who speak a nontonal language such as English, however, absolute pitch is more like a first language, for which the critical period occurs at a much younger age.” (Don Monroe in Scientific American).

I interpret this as saying the Chinese students’ brains are already familiar with pitch when they are introduced to it in the context of music, making it like a second language.  The English students must encounter and master pitch fresh.  Just as the relationship between Romance languages makes it easier for a French speaker to learn Spanish, so the tonality of the Chinese language provides a firmer basis for acquiring perfect pitch.  One advantage to Deutsch’s research is that she did not rely on relatively low resolution fMRI results, but rather on the students’ ability to prove they have perfect pitch.

“60 percent of Beijing students who had begun studying music between the ages of four and five years old passed a test for absolute pitch, whereas only 14 percent of the American students did.” (Don Monroe in Scientific American)

None of this can allow us to conclude that Chinese and other tonal speakers are automatically more musical than non-tonals.  “In both groups, students who started their musical instruction later were less likely to have absolute pitch, and none of the Rochester [non-tonal] students that began training after their eighth birthday had the ability.” (Monroe)  My wife is Chinese and unabashedly tone deaf.  Plainly, some hard work is still involved with acquiring this peculiarly awesome ability.

According to the research quoted in this BBC article — Chinese ‘takes more brainpower’ — Chinese speakers use both sides of their brain, while English speakers use only one.

The researchers believe that this need to interpret intonation is why Mandarin speakers need to use both sides of their brain.

The right temporal lobe is normally associated with being able to process music or tones.

“We think that Mandarin speakers interpret intonation and melody in the right temporal lobe to give the correct meaning to the spoken words,” said Dr Scott.

“It seems that the structure of the language you learn as a child affects how the structure of your brain develops to decode speech.

“Native English speakers, for example, find it extraordinarily difficult to learn Mandarin.” (BBC News as linked above)

In my last cogsci-driven post I disavowed any hold on being an expert of any sort, but I’ve read enough cognitive science to be highly suspicious of the claim that only half an English speaker’s brain is active while he speaks (even if that claim was limited to brain activity specifically associated with speaking).

I find myself in hearty agreement with the final statement though.  Damn skippy!  It’s really hard for a native English speaker to learn Mandarin Chinese.  The tones are the slipperiest part, without a doubt.

Then again, the Chinese struggle pretty hard with English too.  According to one Chinese I met while studying, English has tones too!  This is why saying the word “democracy” as “DEMO-crassy” gets you strange stares, while the correct “duh-MOH-cruh-see” will bring listening comprehension.  The accents and slurs, slides and pauses, rises and falls of English are every bit as labyrinthine to a native Mandarin speaker as the tones of Chinese for the English one.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

If you’re willing to go along with that hypothesis, then you’re probably ready to agree then that having a brain tuned to pitches is like having a brain tuned to any richly complicated activity: most or all sports, cryptography, debate, writing, etc.  Not all of us have a similar experience, but some of us were studying at a young age, practicing, striving to master our skill in order to obtain some elusive future triumph.  As young children, we all had different goals.  Some of us were truly self-driven and just did it out of love.  Some of us had shown talent and were being pushed towards it.  Still others may have fluctuated between these two.

In all cases, you end up with a person that is a comparative master of her trade.  They say Michael Phelps was a swimming anomaly because he started so late, at age seven.  I started swimming as an infant, as did my son.  Now, four afternoons a week I watch him slowly acquiring one thing in particular:  an innate feel for the water.  Working out will someday be important, and it’s good that he’s getting the feel for that now.  But what he needs to do even more than that is to learn how his body moves in the water: how the rise and fall of his breaths carry him through it, how the angle of his hand determines a change in orientation, what to do with his lips to keep water out of his nose when he’s underwater and facing “up”.  Great swimmers don’t motor through the water, as so many observers expect.  The great swimmers are “tricking” the water.  They’re sliding past, apologizing to it in a million little ways, and slipping towards the real “up” to swimmers: that which lies ahead.

Finally then, what we did as young children had a long and lasting impact on us as adults.  We gained great facility with parts of our world.  In other posts, I’ve talked about how my mother’s love and pressure formed me into a better person.  The vibrations of that love are now rippling through me and over my own children.

The talent of speaking Chinese isn’t enough to have perfect pitch.  You have to study music too.