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 ...

This news release is available in German. The weather impacts not only upon our mood but also our voice. An international research team including scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for ...

In some languages, the meaning of each word is not only conveyed by the order of its syllables, but also by the pitch. Tonal languages such as Cantonese, Mandarin or Yoruba are difficult to learn for ...

Opera singers and dry air don't get along. In fact, the best professional singers require humid settings to help them achieve the right pitch. “When your vocal cords are really dry, they're a little ...

Among the many ways you can define language differences, one of the easiest is by the use of tone. For some languages (like English), the differences between words that are pronounced similarly has to ...

Your mother tongue may modify your musical ability. Speaking a native language that requires tones appears to boost perception of melody, but at the cost of rhythm, researchers report April 26 in ...

The very first cry of neonates is marked by their maternal language. This seems to be especially apparent in tonal languages, where pitch and pitch fluctuation determine the meaning of words. Chinese ...

Some may remember taking foreign language classes during school or in preparation for a new job or some travel. There are over 7,100 spoken languages in the world, according to Ethnologue. While it’s ...

Tonal languages are different from non-tonal languages because tonal languages are dependent on the emphasis and pronunciation, because how a word is said will affect its meaning. It is quite ...

Humans have a unique natural ability to develop highly complex linguistic systems — an ability that lies in our genes but is also shaped by our different environments. We can learn languages from ...