Speaking a tonal language could boost your melodic ability, but at the cost of rhythm.

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 speakers are better able to discern between subtly different melodies, while non-tonal speakers are better able to tell whether a rhythm is beating in time with the music. The researchers report that these advantages — in melodic perception for tonal speakers and rhythm perception for non-tonal speakers — were equivalent to about half the boost that you would have from taking music lessons.

While non-tonal languages like English might use pitch to inflect emotion or to signify a question, raising or lowering the pitch of a syllable never changes the meaning of a word. In contrast, tonal languages like Mandarin use sound patterns to distinguish syllables and words. “This property requires pitch sensitivity in both speakers and listeners, lest one scold one’s mother instead of one’s horse,” says Jingxuan Liu, a native Mandarin speaker and the study’s other first author.

“We still find this effect even with a wide range of different languages and with speakers who vary a lot in their culture and background, which really supports the idea that the difference in musical processing in tonal language speakers is driven by their common tonal language experience rather than cultural differences,” says Liu.

Speaking a given type of language is no substitute for music lessons, however. “Tonal language speakers had a boost in their abilities proportional to about half the boost that you would have on average if you had music lessons,” says Hilton, “but non-tonal language speakers were better at rhythm, and both melody and rhythm are important parts of music.”

“One huge challenge for understanding how humans process the world is breaking down big topics like music or language into their components like pitch or beat or melody,” says senior author Elika Bergelson, a professor of psychology and neuroscientist at Duke University. “A second challenge is sampling large enough samples of participants that are diverse enough in their experiences to actually be able to draw confident conclusions.”