Could it be that cellist Yo-Yo Ma owes his perfect musical pitch to his Chinese parents? While we may never know the definitive answer, new research from the University of California, San Diego has ...

Lexical tones, which involve specific pitch contours that differentiate word meanings, are fundamental to tonal languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese. In both languages, subtle variations in pitch, ...

Your native language could impact your musical ability. A global study that compared the melodic and rhythmic abilities of almost half a million people speaking 54 different languages found that tonal ...