Tonal language speakers experience less vocal impairment from alcohol

One of the functions affected by alcohol is pitch control: intoxicated people tend to exhibit reduced control of the pitch of their voice. However, this may be less true for native speakers of tonal languages, where the pitch is crucial to the meaning of the spoken word.

Tang et al. studied the vocal effect of intoxication on native speakers of tonal and semi-tonal languages, such as Mandarin or Korean. They found that native tonal speakers have much tighter control of their pitch when inebriated, even when speaking a non-tonal language.

“This suggests that the pitch control mechanisms involved in being a native speaker of a tonal language can override the expected effects of alcohol, even in a second language,” said author Kevin Tang.

The authors recruited participants who were native speakers of three different languages: German, Korean, and Chinese, which use tone never, sometimes, and always, respectively. Participants in all three groups also spoke English as a second language. Each participant read a segment of dialogue while intoxicated and while sober, and differences in pitch control were calculated based on acoustic analysis.

The researchers believe this method can be used to learn much more about the human brain.

“Many important findings about the mind stemmed from researching clinical populations with a language disorder such as Parkinson’s disease patients,” said Tang. “We consider our results to connect to this type of research: by temporarily disrupting the typical physical and cognitive state of a speaker, intoxication can serve as a window into cognition.”

Source: “Intoxication and pitch control in tonal and non-tonal language speakers,” by Kevin Tang, Charles B. Chang, Sam Green, Kai Xin Bao, Michael Hindley, Young Shin Kim, and Andrew Nevins, JASA Express Letters (2022). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0011572 .