Are there any studies showing that absolute pitch affects second language acquisition?

Question

I recently became aware of the phenomenon of absolute pitch--the ability to identify a pitch without external reference. I am almost certain I have this ability--I get annoyed by out-of-tune pianos, and I can essentially remember long pieces of music and play them back on a piano months later (think 20 minutes long).

I'm curious if this ability has impacted my ability to learn languages, and particularly to mimic native accents.

Background:

Because I grew up in Guangzhou, China, my first language (only learned informally) is Cantonese. In elementary school I formally learned Mandarin (the first thing they teach explicitly is pronunciation) in Grade 1, and it is the only way I know how to type Chinese characters. The Chinese school system begins teaching children English in Grade 3, but it is very slow and limited.

When I immigrated to Canada I had to learn English much more quickly and intensely (that was Grade 8). What is interesting, is that (and I noticed this myself, as well as hearing comments from native English speakers) I do not have an accent. I remember a teacher saying "oh, I thought you were born here [in Canada]" when I told her that I immigrated to Canada only a few years ago.

Of course, this is only about spoken language. On handwriting, I had forgotten how to write some very basic Chinese characters because I use a computer to type these characters 99% of the time (I only need to know how to pronounce the character in Mandarin to type it).

Answer 1

Summarized from Absolute Pitch, Speech, and Tone Language: Some Experiments and a Proposed Framework (emphasis mine):

The verbal labeling of pitches necessarily involves speech and language, so in searching for a framework in which to place absolute pitch, we can consider further evidence that it is tied to linguistic processing.

In most right-handers, the planum temporale, which is critically involved in speech processing, is larger in the left than in the right hemisphere. Schlaug et al. observed that this leftward asymmetry was greater among musicians with absolute pitch than among those who did not possess this faculty. This finding indicates that absolute pitch is subserved, at least in part, by brain regions that underly speech processing.

Another body of evidence concerns an intriguing parallel between the critical periods involved in the acquisition of speech and language on the one hand, and the acquisition of absolute pitch on the other.

Studies of second language acquisition have confirmed this picture.