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Abstract:
We report a new case of congenital amusia, a selective
musical disorder which results in an overall deficit in music
perception. Interestingly, this musical disorder is not causally
related to any specific hearing impairment, cognitive deficit,
socio-affective disturbance, nor lack of musical exposure. The case
is an English-speaking retired teacher, Dolores. She was tested
with a variety of musical processing tasks which serve to evaluate
melodic perception, the recognition of song melody versus lyrics,
and musical memory. Results revealed that Dolores was seriously
impaired on all musical tasks, while maintaining recognition for
song lyrics. These findings motivated an exploration of prosodic
versus musical processing. Prosodic discrimination was evaluated
with sentence pairs where members of a pair differed by intonation
or rhythm, and musical discrimination was measured using
musical-phrase pairs derived from the prosody of the sentence
pairs. Dolores achieved near perfect scores in tasks requiring
prosodic discrimination, while she performed at chance in musical
discrimination conditions. The results suggest that the processing
of prosodic and musical information can be neurally and
functionally dissociated.
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