Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in music perception, including discriminating and remembering melodies and melodic contours. As non-amusic listeners can perceive contours in dimensions other than pitch, such as loudness and brightness, our present study investigated whether amusics' pitch contour deficits also extend to these other auditory dimensions. Amusic and control participants performed an identification task for ten familiar melodies and a short-term memory task requiring the discrimination of changes in the contour of novel four-tone melodies. For both tasks, melodic contour was defined by pitch, brightness, or loudness. Amusic participants showed some ability to extract contours in all three dimensions. For familiar melodies, amusic participants showed impairment in all conditions, perhaps reflecting the fact that the long-term memory representations of the familiar melodies were defined in pitch. In the contour discrimination task with novel melodies, amusic participants exhibited less impairment for loudness-based melodies than for pitch- or brightness-based melodies, suggesting some specificity of the deficit for spectral changes, if not for pitch alone. The results suggest pitch and brightness may not be processed by the same mechanisms as loudness, and that short-term memory for loudness contours may be spared to some degree in congenital amusia.

中文翻译：

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音高和非音高轮廓的短期和长期记忆：来自先天性失乐症的见解。

先天性失乐症是一种神经发育障碍，其特征是音乐感知缺陷，包括辨别和记忆旋律和旋律轮廓。由于非音乐听众可以感知音高以外的维度的轮廓，例如响度和亮度，我们目前的研究调查了音乐人的音高轮廓缺陷是否也延伸到这些其他听觉维度。音乐组和对照组的参与者执行了十种熟悉的旋律的识别任务和需要辨别新颖的四音旋律轮廓变化的短期记忆任务。对于这两项任务，旋律轮廓是由音高、亮度或响度定义的。音乐参与者表现出一定的提取所有三个维度轮廓的能力。对于熟悉的旋律，无音乐的参与者在所有条件下都表现出损伤，这可能反映了这样一个事实：熟悉旋律的长期记忆表征是通过音高来定义的。在新颖旋律的轮廓辨别任务中，与基于音高或亮度的旋律相比，无音乐参与者对基于响度的旋律表现出的损害较小，这表明频谱变化的缺陷具有一定的特异性，即使不是单独的音高。结果表明，音调和亮度可能不会通过与响度相同的机制来处理，并且在先天性失乐症中，响度轮廓的短期记忆可能会在某种程度上幸免。