Forget Mozart - Learn Chinese
Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke
Do you remember the study that purported to show that listening to Mozart improved college-student performance on various intellectual tasks? And do you also remember that Governor Miller of Georgia immediately started giving free CDs to all new mothers in his state and that Florida passed a law requiring toddlers in state-run schools to listen to classical music every day?
Well, as good as a spoonful of "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" may be for a child’s body and soul, a new research study suggests that speakers of tonal languages may develop a form of perfect pitch.
James Glanz reported on the front-page of the NY Times on 11/5/99 that Dr. Diana Deutsch, a UCSD psychologist, had found that speakers of Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese have an uncanny ability to repeat tonal words learned days before at the same pitch within fractions of a semitone. (A semitone is the half-step difference between two notes on the piano, e.g., the difference between the notes C and C# or between E and F.)
While the test group was small, the results are so one-sided that it seems hard to argue that they are statistically irrelevant. Of the 7 Vietnamese in the study, all reproduced words within 1.1 semitones and four did better than a half semitone. The 15 Chinese who were tested did even better: They reproduced almost all the words within a fraction of a semitone.
While I was initially surprised by these results, I reflected on my experience in Liberia, West Africa and am now surprised that a possible connection between perfect pitch and tonal languages wasn’t tested long ago.
From 1968 to 1970 I was a teacher trainer living among the Kpelle tribe upcountry in the small village of Palala. The Kpelle were a wonderful people who lived each day at a nomiya (never-mind-ya) pace that gave me plenty of extra time to read and explore and look for other jobs to keep me busy. I also tried to learn their language, similar to Mandarin Chinese in that it uses four tones, but found it extremely difficult to say words correctly.
If English were tonal, the meaning of a word like "way" would vary depending on whether the pitch sequence was high-low, low-high, flat or high-low-high. Unfortunately, when a pitch-ignorant person like myself is learning such a language, there is only a 1 in 4 chance of getting the right pitch sequence on a given word. By the end of just a five word sequence the probability of randomly getting all the words right is 1 in 1024 or 0.1%; to put it another way, there is a 99.9% chance that in asking for directions to the latrine, something else entirely will be said.
To demonstrate how difficult such a language can be, ask a friend who speaks a tonal language like Chinese to say a sentence that uses homonyms with different tonal sequences. While you’ll hear tonal variations, the sequence will sound as though the same word is repeated four or more times.
In addition to working with teachers to improve their skills, I spent time in classrooms that were usually overflowing with children - two, three or more to a desk - all eager and well behaved as I taught them math, did simple science experiments and worked with them on their English. I would say phrases that the children would repeat and we would use the words and phrases in different contexts, and it was quite remarkable how the children were able to reproduce both the pronunciation and inflection of each word. While I used inflection to convey emotion and punctuation, they were learning English as though tones differentiated the meanings of words. Since I do not have perfect pitch, I have no idea if they were repeating the words with the same pitch each time, but the effect was so marked that it certainly seems possible that they were.
So, if you want your child to have perfect pitch, which should improve his musical ability, and a better understanding of mathematics, have him learn Chinese.
And why did I sneak in mathematics, you ask?
Well, I have this pet theory that I’ve been carrying around in my pocket that children who learn to read Chinese have a head start on learning mathematics, because a mathematical expression is logographic rather than alphabetic. By this I mean that the expression 2a + 4 = 6 can only be read with comprehension by one who understands the meaning of the symbols. Except for the letter "a", all the characters in this expression are logograms rather than alphabetic words, and, like Chinese characters that can be read by Chinese who speak different dialects, these mathematical symbols are understood regardless of the language being spoken.
So perhaps a Chinese student, by having to work so very hard to understand 10,000 characters, is symbolically exercising his brain in a way that increases his mathematical aptitude.
But it’s just a visceral theory that I’ve never tested.
Have I tried to learn Chinese to see if it makes any sense, you ask?
Heck no. Chinese is too hard.
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com