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

General Discussion 166
Friederici, Fiebach, et al (2006) demonstrated a dissociation within the left inferior
frontal cortex between the deep frontal operculum – responding to syntactic violations –
and the inferior portion of the left pars opercularis (BA 44) – modulated by the com-
plexity of well-formed sentences. This leads to another candidate process – working
memory – that also relies (at least to some extent) on the IFG (e.g., Braver et al., 1997).
Because language processing is realized as a sequential process, a word in a noncanonical
position has to be identified as a moved element and to be kept active in
working memory until its original position in the syntactic structure can be specified.
More general, working memory functions may be a prerequisite to comprehend a musical
or a sentential phrase, holding its elements in memory and building relations between
these elements in order to detect their underlying structure and to build a coherent
percept.
Turning to a more functional perspective, prosodic processing might interact with syntactic
processing. It was demonstrated that prosodic cues are of considerable importance
for language acquisition (Fernald, 1989; Papoušek, 1996), e.g., for word segmentation
and the extraction of phrase structure. In adults, prosody is used for structural disambiguation,
to guide parsing decisions, and to predict upcoming information in an utterance.
A recent study by Eckstein (2005) indicated an influence of prosody merely on
later processes than the early syntactic structure building (in adults). However, the processes
of fast and automatic phrase structure building are thought to develop from later
processes (cf. Hahne et al., 2004) for which a contribution of prosodic information may
beneficial. The parts of the neural network in the inferior frontal cortex are not specific
to the processing of syntax: The inferior part of the right IFG is also found implicated in
prosody processing (cf. Friederici & Alter, 2004; see also M. Meyer et al., 2000;
Wartenburger et al., 2007). Musical training, leading to an improved processing of musical
syntax, might implicitly train this neural network (which is similar to the network
used for syntactic processing). This could be an explanation for the transfer effects
between musical and linguistic syntax processing. It may also open new perspectives for
the treatment of language impairment.
14.4 Future perspectives
In this section some ideas will be proposed how the results of the present work might be
extended in further studies. It is organized in three parts. One part contains methodological
considerations, another part is related to theoretical issues, and a third part consists
of some reasoning about how the knowledge gathered from this work may be utilized.