The mother tongue affects the hearing ability of people

A group of researchers from the University of Helsinki in Finland discovered that people's hearing abilities are different according to their linguistic and musical backgrounds.

The brain is responsible for converting the impulses received-through the ear-into understandable sounds, in addition to discriminating those that are not relevant. This auditory system is a filter to the sounds we find in the environment, which is exercised with exposure to different environments, such as the mother tongue and music education.

The research compared auditory abilities of people with different linguistic and musical backgrounds to detect thresholds of discrimination based on the intensity, frequency and duration of sounds.

The results showed that the Filandeses have an advantage in the processing of the auditory duration with respect to the ones of German speech, in addition they showed a greater capacity of discrimination of frequency - what allows to distinguish two sounds listened at the same time.

On the other hand, musicians who speak Mandarin, in general, have a better discrimination of behavior in frequency and duration. The author of the study, Caitlin Dawson, believes that because - both Mandarin and Finnish - include long pronunciations and tones that determine the meaning of words, their speakers are very sensitive to the times of sounds.

The results also reveal that the musical experience has effects on the auditory characteristics, but they depend mainly on the phonetic patterns of the native language of the person.