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

Music and Language 43
described in the section on relational processing (e.g., grouping according to Gestalt
laws). The infant’s learning is constrained by its perceptual abilities. The comparability
of the mechanisms, involved in the acquisition of music and language suggests that at
least some aspects of music and language are acquired via the same learning mechanisms.
Presumably, these mechanisms are utilized to avoid “blooming buzzing confusion”
(W. James, 1890) by virtue of a perceptual system that weights some cues more
than others and a learning system flexibly adaptable to the actual task. Categorical perception
is an example for such a perceptual constraint and infants employ categorical
perception for speech and non-speech sounds. For example, in language categorical
perception is applied to phonemes, whereas in music tones or chords may be categorized
according to their frequency spectrum.
Computational constraints like pattern detection or satistical learning may be involved
in the segmentation of musical phrases and the abstraction of the regularities that enable
the processing of musical structure. Categorical knowledge may enable children to track
consistent patterns in the input and to detect the probabilities of particular tones to cooccur
to locate the boundaries between both, words and tones (Saffran et al., 1999).
Infant learners can detect structure employing either rule-based or statistical learning
(cf. Perruchet & Pacton, 2006). While rule-based learning relies on chunking, statistical
learning relies on frequency distributions. Both principles abstract from the particular
elements in the input to recognize “grammatical” sequences and involve the detection of
sound patterns that cue underlying structure. These mechanisms might not be dedicated
solely to language learning but might also be used for learning in other domains. For
example, infants may use such mechanisms to acquire knowledge about musical scale
structure and Western tonal conventions (exploiting their distributional properties, see
Krumhansl, 1990; Tillmann et al., 2000).
Suprasegmental cues (which are similar for music and language) are probabilistically
related with structural boundaries and, thus, are assumed to play a role in delineating
structural information: Infants are shown to listen longer to music when pauses are
placed on appropriate rather than random positions (Jusczyk & Krumhansl, 1993;
Krumhansl & Jusczyk, 1990). These prosodic cues are highly salient to infants and
drive much of the early processing in both domains. This might rely on their earliest
learning experiences – the filtering properties of the uterus leave rhythmic cues intact
relative to high frequency information.
Social constraints may channel what information will be focused when infants were
familiarized with music of their culture and with language. The emphasis, introduced by
specific musical properties in infant-directed singing and speech may help to focus the
attention on these properties.