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

1 Introduction
Language and music are important communication systems of human species and very
closely connected cognitive domains. Both consist of hierarchically structured sequences
that are organized of perceptually discrete elements. The set of principles governing
the combination of these structural elements into sequences is denoted as syntax.
The neural correlates of the processing of musical and linguistic syntax, their development
and the influence of musical training and specific language impairment (SLI) are
the main focus of the present work.
The introduction contains six chapters that introduce the main topics that were investigated
in the present work. The chapter “Music Perception” provides an overview of
processing steps during music perception, their development, and their neural correlates.
It puts specific emphasis on the processing of musical syntax (e.g., by describing theoretical
and computational models that account for particular aspects of it). The chapter
on “Musical Training” will introduce how such training influences the neural correlates
of music processing. It summarizes these influences on skills, brain anatomy and neurophysiological-functional
markers of cognitive processes. Furthermore, the chapter describes
which transfer effects to other cognitive domains were found in earlier studies.
The chapter “Music and language” presents an overview of the relations of these two
cognitive domains. Some researchers proposed that music and language evolved from a
common ancestor. Of specific importance for the present work is that the neural correlates
of syntactic processing in music and language were demonstrated to strongly overlap.
Moreover, further commonalities between music and language were found – e.g.,
comparable mechanisms in the acquisition of music and language, and a strong influence
of prosody (i.e., the musical aspects of speech) on the acquisition of syntactic regularities
in language.
The chapter “Language perception” outlines how language is acquired and how it is
processed. A specific emphasis in this chapter is put on linguistic syntax, e.g., the
mechanisms of its acquisition, and the neural correlates of its processing. Children with
specific language impairment are considered to have deficiencies especially in their
processing of linguistic syntax. A thorough discussion of the characteristics of this impairment,
and possible risk factors contributing to its occurrence will be given in the
chapter “Specific Language Impairment”. Finally, the chapter “Electroencephalography
and Event-related brain potentials” will provide a brief introduction regarding the primary
method of this work.
Four experiments are contained in the present work. These were set up to investigate the
processing of musical and linguistic syntax in children of different age groups. Cur-