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Comment by randcraw | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those occasions when the research team definitely needs to test on more than the local population of subjects.

Because all the authors appear to be Chinese, probably all the test subjects were too. But because the Chinese language requires substantial awareness of subtle changes in prosody (esp. pitch), it's likely that speakers of other languages will not perform as well on their absolute pitch tests.

I suspect native speakers of Chinese have developed a subtle ear (and voice) for pitch during that critical period of language acquisition in childhood that makes them more able to acquire perfect pitch in adulthood than speakers of other languages, especially western ones.

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This doesn't make sense to me. Everyone can distinguish relative pitch, that's how humans understand music. It was probably a crucial part of human evolution, somehow, as we all can do it. Tonal languages use relative pitch, not absolute pitch. Everyone can learn Cantonese regardless whether they have AP or not. If you claim tonal languages train you for AP that's citation needed, I don't think that's true (we would expect tonal language speakers to be more likely to have AP, a trend we haven't observed).

Here is one paper about that:

Music conservatory students in the U.S. and China were tested. The Chinese subjects spoke the tone language Mandarin, in which pitch is involved in conveying the meaning of words. The American subjects were nontone language speakers. The earlier the age of onset of musical training, the greater the prevalence of absolute pitch; however, its prevalence was far greater among the Chinese than the U.S. students for each level of age of onset of musical training.

http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2006_119_719-722.pdf

You're probably right about the subjects: "Ten adults were recruited at City University of Hong Kong and completed the training." So they'd likely be native Cantonese speakers.

But tonal languages use relative rather than absolute pitch (because different people have different vocal ranges), and all participants in the study improved their performance over time.

So speaking a tonal language or being a musician (also the case for the subjects in the study) can give an advantage, but I'd be surprised if deliberate training of pitch perception had absolutely no effect for people without such an advantage.

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