Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

General Discussion 163
14.2 Influences of Musical Training, Language Impairment,
and Development on Processing Musical and Linguistic
Syntax
Influences of Language Impairment: A main characteristic of children with SLI is
their deficient syntactic processing. In Experiment II was found that these deficiencies
were not restricted to language perception but also for music perception: In children
with SLI, no ERP response to a violation of music-syntactic regularities was observed.
However, these ERP responses are present in children of the same age with TLD and
even in younger (2½-year old) children. Several accounts to the deficiencies in musicsyntactic
processing in children with SLI are conceivable. Two will be briefly discussed.
Firstly, the deficiencies may be due to an impairment of more domain-general
processes that are involved in both the processing of musical and linguistic syntactic
regularities. There are some candidate processes, e.g., deficits in the procedural memory
system (Ullman & Pierpont, 2005), in working memory processes (Baddeley, 2003;
Baddeley et al., 1998), or in grammar processing mechanisms (van der Lely, 2005; van
der Lely et al., 1998). Secondly, the deficiencies of children with SLI, demonstrated for
the processing of syntax in both domains (music and language), might be due to the
strong overlap in the neural resources underlying these processes (for discussion, see
14.3).
Influences of Musical Training: Influences of musical training were found for the
processing of both, music and language. For both age groups (9- and 11-year old children)
an enlarged ERAN amplitude was observed in MT children. This is in accordance
with a large number of studies, demonstrating brain plasticity in response to musical
training (for a detailed overview, see the chapter “Musical Training”). The same result
revealed an earlier study, investigating the processing of musical syntax in adult musicians
(Koelsch, Schmidt et al., 2002). Most presumably, musicians have a larger implicit
and explicit knowledge about the music-syntactic regularities that underlie Western
tonal music. Their enlarged representations of these regularities and of harmonic
relatedness may account for the enlarged ERAN amplitude.
In 11-year old children with MT an ELAN was found (which is lacking in the group
with NM). The LSN – regarded as a precursor of the ELAN, but also reflecting the
detection of violations of the linguistic syntax – had a significantly larger amplitude size
in the children with MT. This demonstrates that musical training may contribute to an
improved processing of linguistic syntax and moreover, to an earlier establishment of
the fast and automatic processes of syntactic structure building. Most presumably, these
differences were not elicited by personality variables of the children, such as the socio-