As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy watching let’s play videos to practice listening, and one of the Chinese let’s play series that I’m watching is 光球 (guāng qiú) playing puzzle game The Witness,
There is a section of the game where the puzzles are based on pitch (you need to correctly identify tones as high, mid or low in increasingly chaotic circumstances) and I noticed that she was doing, while not perfect, a lot better than I did trying to do the same at home!
It got me thinking that maybe since Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese) is a tonal language, this extends to being better at recognizing pitch in general.
A quick google search turned up this article, indicating that this may indeed be the case.
According to the article a study led by Diana Deutsch compared perfect pitch among music students speaking tonal (in this case Mandarin) and non-tonal languages. While the results also depended to a large extent on how early the students had started their music training, there was a huge difference between the groups!
Depending on how early they had started training, among the Chinese students between 40% and 60% had perfect pitch, the corresponding number among the American students was 0%-12%! (i.e of the American students tested that started practicing the latest, not one had perfect pitch, which 40% of the corresponding Chinese students did).
So it does indeed seem to make sense for Chinese speakers to have an easier time with these kinds of problems!
And as an aside, watching that playthrough I also learned that the Chinese word for pitch is yīn gāo (音高, literally sound-high)! Something that always makes me very happy!
Adventures in Language Self-Study 