Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder of pitch perception that may also compromise pitch production. Despite amusics’ long documented difficulties with pitch, previous evidence suggests that familiar music may have an implicit facilitative effect on their performance. It remains, however, unknown whether vocal imitation of song in amusia is influenced by melody familiarity and the presence of lyrics. To address this issue, thirteen Mandarin speaking amusics and 13 matched controls imitated novel song segments with lyrics and on the syllable /la/. Eleven out of these participants in each group also imitated segments of a familiar song. Subsequent acoustic analysis was conducted to measure pitch and timing matching accuracy based on eight acoustic measures. While amusics showed worse imitation performance than controls across seven out of the eight pitch and timing measures, melody familiarity was found to have a favorable effect on their performance on three pitch-related acoustic measures. The presence of lyrics did not affect either group’s performance substantially. Correlations were observed between amusics’ performance on the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia and imitation of the novel song. We discuss implications in terms of music familiarity, memory demands, the relevance of lexical information, and the link between perception and production.

中文翻译：

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先天失乐中的歌曲模仿

先天性失乐症是一种音高感知的神经遗传疾病，也可能影响音高的产生。尽管 amusics 在音高方面存在长期记录的困难，但先前的证据表明，熟悉的音乐可能对其表演产生隐含的促进作用。然而，在amusia中对歌曲的声音模仿是否受到旋律熟悉度和歌词存在的影响仍然未知。为了解决这个问题，13 个讲普通话的 amusic 和 13 个匹配的控件模仿了带有歌词和音节 /la/ 的小说歌曲片段。每组的这些参与者中有 11 人还模仿了熟悉歌曲的片段。随后进行声学分析，以基于八种声学测量来测量音高和时间匹配精度。虽然在八个音高和时间测量中的七个中，音乐表现出比对照更差的模仿性能，但发现旋律熟悉度对其在三个与音高相关的声学测量上的表现有有利影响。歌词的存在并没有显着影响任何一组的表现。观察到 amusics 在蒙特利尔 Amusia 评估电池中的表现与对小说歌曲的模仿之间存在相关性。我们讨论音乐熟悉度、记忆需求、词汇信息的相关性以及感知和生产之间的联系方面的影响。观察到 amusics 在蒙特利尔 Amusia 评估电池中的表现与对小说歌曲的模仿之间存在相关性。我们讨论音乐熟悉度、记忆需求、词汇信息的相关性以及感知和生产之间的联系方面的影响。观察到 amusics 在蒙特利尔 Amusia 评估电池中的表现与对小说歌曲的模仿之间存在相关性。我们讨论音乐熟悉度、记忆需求、词汇信息的相关性以及感知和生产之间的联系方面的影响。