Hearing distinctions  

Scientific American glosses some new research on absolute (perfect) pitch and tonal languages. The result -- that speakers of tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese are more likely to have absolute pitch -- is interesting enough, but the article seems to miss the distinction between absolute and relative pitch.

In tonal languages, the meaning of a word is partly derived from how the speaker's pitch changes over the course of that word. Note that it's the change in frequency, rather than the absolute frequency, that supplies this meaning. The article confuses the issue, equating this ability in speech with absolute pitch in music, defined here:

Fewer than one American in 10,000 has absolute pitch, which means they can identify or produce a note without reference to any other note. Also called perfect pitch, this skill requires distinguishing sounds that differ by just 6 percent in frequency.

But the ability to "identify or produce a note without reference to any other note" has nothing to do with tonal languages, where tones only have meaning with reference to other notes. The musical ability that corresponds to this skill is relative pitch. This doesn't make the result less interesting; on the contrary, it suggests some relationship between the how relative and absolute pitch are wired. But it's still a crucial distinction.

By the way, a six percent difference in frequency is a lot bigger than it sounds. It works out to about a half step -- something any amateur musician (and probably the vast majority of listeners) can distinguish. Provocatively, the half step is also the smallest unit of pitch in Western music (there are other musical traditions tuned much more finely), so the definition may be a bit loaded. If the goal is to study absolute pitch across musical cultures, it would be wise to come up with a definition that's not specific to one!

MORE: A reader writes in to say the article may have meant that speakers of tonal languages actually use the same pitches (to some unspecified level of precision) every time they use a particular word, even on different days. This would surprise me, but I suppose it's possible.