"I plan to discuss the relationships between language and music..."

Pim - if you don't mind, i'd like to start picking your thoughts, as well as others on this particular subject. As one who's had trouble w/ learning to speak any foreign language, though at one point, decades ago, i could read French quite well and Latin ..marginally..i've wondered about this relationship a lot. I've been surrounded by family and friends (brother, sister, wife, son, nieces) who are all very musical (conservatory, composer, voice scholarships, just very good singers etc) who happen to all be very adept at picking up languages - from Chinese, Japanese to Spanish, Italian and French. I am far less musical, I have a deficient sense of rhythm in particular - i gave up formal training when i couldn't master a 4 against 5 passage and though i can recognize pitch differences well, "controlling" pitch when singing is far more..random. I've always had an awful time, from jr hschool on, trying to do any "conversational" language. Part was always translating in my mind, but another major part was my self-consciousness with my problems with pronunciation. And it just seemed less than random that my far more musical family/relations had a much easier time with the spoken part of learning a foreign language.

Conversely there've been studies that have affirmed the obvious - that musicians who grow up speaking a tonal language are more likely to maintain perfect pitch throughout life (it's also a function of how early the students begin training). Knowledgeable thoughts or ad hoc opinions welcome. But I've been bugged for ~40+ yrs thinking about this possible relationshipo.

If there is a connection here, consider me the exception to the rule. Whenever I study a language, I find speaking & listening very difficult, and reading and writing typically quite easy. Pronunciation wasn't difficult for me in theory (Spanish and Italian), but I did trip over my tongue all the time & it just took me too long to formulate something in my head & get it out of my mouth. I'm also pretty hopeless when it comes to pronouncing French & German, which is not great when you're in front of a class, trying to talk about Schubert or Debussy... :)

I read This is your brain on music a couple of years ago and found the research on this whole issue fascinating.

My sister, who is a professional violinist and has absolute pitch, but who has never been interested in foreign languages very much, says that her Japanese friends tell her that her accent is pretty much perfect though she only knows a couple of words and phrases.

I grew up like Bob M. in a houseful of musicians but I have some hearing loss and my pitch isn't perfect, tends to kind of go sharp. But, I love languages (though I've never tried to use a tonal one) and pick them up with some fluidity. However, my accent always shows through.

I read somewhere (do not remember well) that Japanese all have perfect pitch when it comes to singing because the language itself is depends so much on pitch. "All" seems like a huge generalization, but again I am citing from memory.

The study i remember compared American and Chinese conservatory students. I'd have to find the study to get the exact %s but the take away points were: 1. Perfect absolute pitch (as opposed to perfect relative pitch)..the ability to sing or recognize the Dsharp above middle C, say, if played in isolation or if asked to sing a particular note .. was present in a much higher % of Chinese students than American students of roughly the same degree of musical accomplishment; 2. that for both cohorts that the age at which a student began formal musical training was the most important predictor of having perfect pitch - the younger the more likely perfect pitch would be a characteristic of the player. Though I don't think that the % amongst the Chinese students was much higher than 20% @ the most. And maybe 8% among American students. Those numbers are wild approximations.

Anecdotally, my brother and I would be exceptions along with Medellia. He has perfect pitch. I don't. He has great hearing. I don't. He loves music. I'd love to love music. When I first started learning Chinese again (both my brother and I have a similar amount of Mandarin background from our childhoods), I couldn't say anything - listening comprehension has always been tough for me as well - but my tones and pronunciation were by all accounts great. My brother? Not so much. The other day I spoke to him on the phone in a conference call w/my mom and he told us "xin nian kuai le." My mom, a native speaker of Mandarin, thought he was using "some weird English word I don't know."

I'll lend anecdotal support to what a few people have observed--grew up speaking two languages and singing, and I have perfect relative pitch and reasonably good absolute pitch. I am also a good mimic of accents in both languages I speak and languages I don't (big problem in Japan, where as soon as you show the least degree of accentual proficiency people assume you speak perfectly and are off to the races just assuming you'll keep up) and a good mimic of voices generally (though there are some I just can't do--I practiced my sister's voice extensively for teasing purposes but never quite got it). An Israeli friend and I used to do a game where he would sing a line of a song in Hebrew and I would duplicate, and the passages got longer and longer and faster and faster.

On the other hand, I am a hopeless screwup when I try to read music, or improvise on an instrument, or do anything that requires seeing the scale as an abstract system rather than just feeling pitches. And, as alluded to above, my grammar and lexicon always lag far, far behind my accent in any language I choose to study.

and math? Chatting w/ a friend @ work today, she mentioned that her organic chem teacher, a Mexican w/ a very good command of English, always reverted, apologetically, to Spanish, when working out the relatively simple algebraic portions of reactions. While he could teach chemistry in English (and very well, Jean reported) - he could only do arithmetic and math in his mother tongue.

>9 bobmcconnaughey: ha! my mum too! Deepest darkest dialect: "ans und ans is zwoa, zwoa und zwoa is via, via und via is ocht . . . ." I always wonder how that worked given that she was a grade 1 teacher in Canada.