Impaired vowel perception in congenital amusia: Evidence from event-related potentials

Congenital amusia is an auditory perception disorder present from birth. It has been presumed to affect only the musical domain. However, several studies now show that amusics also have impaired perception of intonation and linguistic tones.
We show that amusia also influences linguistically relevant cues other than pitch by investigating the perception of German front high vowels, differentiated by duration and formant frequency. We assessed amusics’ electrophysiological responses, more specifically the MMN with a multi-deviant oddball paradigm.
We used an lmer model for the MMN data, finding significant main effects for group with amusics having a smaller MMN than controls.
Our study shows that amusia negatively affects vowel perception and has therefore more far-reaching consequences for speech perception than previously assumed. We found differences in the MMN, reflecting differences in early auditory change detection.