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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on July 10, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp113
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© 2009 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Absolute Pitch—Functional Evidence of Speech-Relevant Auditory Acuity

Mathias S. Oechslin, Martin Meyer and Lutz Jäncke

Department of Neuropsychology, University of Zurich, CH-8050 Zurich, Switzerland

Address correspondence to Lutz Jäncke, PhD, Department of Neuropsychology, University of Zurich, Binzmühlestrasse 14, CH-8050 Zurich, Switzerland. Email: l.jaencke{at}psychologie.uzh.ch.

Absolute pitch (AP) has been shown to be associated with morphological changes and neurophysiological adaptations in the planum temporale, a cortical area involved in higher-order auditory and speech perception processes. The direct link between speech processing and AP has hitherto not been addressed. We provide first evidence that AP compared with relative pitch (RP) ability is associated with significantly different hemodynamic responses to complex speech sounds. By systematically varying the lexical and/or prosodic information of speech stimuli, we demonstrated consistent activation differences in AP musicians compared with RP musicians and nonmusicians. These differences relate to stronger activations in the posterior part of the middle temporal gyrus and weaker activations in the anterior mid-part of the superior temporal gyrus. Furthermore, this pattern is considerably modulated by the auditory acuity of AP. Our results suggest that the neural underpinnings of pitch processing expertise exercise a strong influence on propositional speech perception (sentence meaning).

Key Words: absolute pitch • fMRI • musical expertise • speech processing


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