> It might be argued that the high performance levels shown by the Chinese students was genetic in origin, rather than resulting from the acquisition of tone language. To examine this hypothesis, the prevalence of absolute pitch was evaluated amongst students at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music17. Most of the subjects were Caucasian and speakers of nontone language such as English. The subjects with tone language in their background, and were of East Asian ethnicity, were classified by how fluently they spoke a tone language. Figure 5 shows the average percentage correct for each subgroup. As can be seen, the nontone language speakers showed a very low performance level on the test. In contrast, among those with tone language in their background, those who reported that they spoke a tone language ‘very fluently’ performed very well. Those who reported that they spoke a tone language ‘fairly fluently’ performed less well, but still better than the nontone language speakers. However, the performance of those who reported that they did not speak a tone language fluently was no better than that of the Caucasian nontone language speakers. Moreover, the performance of the ‘tone very fluent’ subjects - who had their music education in the U.S. - was slightly (though not significantly) higher than that of the Beijing group we had studied earlier, showing that the high performance level of the Beijing group cannot be attributed to their country of music education.