北京师范大学认知神经科学与学习国家重点实验室南云老师课题组于2010年8月3日在Brain上发表了题为Congenital amusia in speakers of a tone language: association with lexical tone agnosia的研究论文，主要探讨了中文母语人群中先天性失乐症的音调障碍问题。
南云老师课题组发现，以音调语言（中文）为母语的人群中也有先天性失乐症的个体存在，并且部分先天性失乐症个体同时合并有语言的声调认知障碍。更为有趣的是，这部分先天性失乐症个体虽然不能够识别听觉呈现的语言声调，却可以在口语交流中正确地使用不同的声调。
音调障碍同时存在于音乐与语言两个范畴，并且语言声调的听觉认知与声调口语输出二者存在分离。这两个重要的新发现将引发一系列音乐与语言认知领域的进一步研究探索。
这一系列的研究结果将会对教育与医疗中有关音乐与语言音调障碍的识别与干预产生深远影响。
推荐英文摘要：
Brain doi: 10.1093/brain/awq178
Congenital amusia in speakers of a tone language: association with lexical tone agnosia
Yun Nan1,*, Yanan Sun1 and Isabelle Peretz2,*
1 State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, People's Republic of China
2 BRAMS Laboratory and Department of Psychology, University of Montreal, C.P. 6128, succ. Centre-ville, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3C 3J7
Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects the processing of musical pitch in speakers of non-tonal languages like English and French. We assessed whether this musical disorder exists among speakers of Mandarin Chinese who use pitch to alter the meaning of words. Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, we tested 117 healthy young Mandarin speakers with no self-declared musical problems and 22 individuals who reported musical difficulties and scored two standard deviations below the mean obtained by the Mandarin speakers without amusia. These 22 amusic individuals showed a similar pattern of musical impairment as did amusic speakers of non-tonal languages, by exhibiting a more pronounced deficit in melody than in rhythm processing. Furthermore, nearly half the tested amusics had impairments in the discrimination and identification of Mandarin lexical tones. Six showed marked impairments, displaying what could be called lexical tone agnosia, but had normal tone production. Our results show that speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin may experience musical pitch disorder despite early exposure to speech-relevant pitch contrasts. The observed association between the musical disorder and lexical tone difficulty indicates that the pitch disorder as defining congenital amusia is not specific to music or culture but is rather general in nature.
