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

Music and Language 44
Neural constraints help to channel information to be acquired by information which
was learned before. That is, as soon as regularities of the music of the own culture are
acquired, abilities to perceive the music of another cultures may disappear. Such processes
may apply to the acquisition of musical scales, tonality, and harmony. That is,
infants perceive and remember music which is structured in accordance to the rules of
their musical system as their experience with that music increases (Schellenberg &
Trehub, 1999; Trehub, 2000; Trehub et al., 1987). Vice versa, they simultaneously loose
the ability to perceive the music of any culture (Lynch et al., 1991; Trehub et al., 1999).
Comparably, in language they lose their ability to discriminate phonemes of any language
(Cheour et al., 1998).
4.3 Similarities in processing music and language
Whereas some researchers favour a modular view of music processing with musicspecific
neuronal networks (Peretz & Coltheart, 2003; Peretz & Zatorre, 2005), an alternative
view points to significant overlap between neuronal structures utilized in language
and music processing (Koelsch, 2005; Patel, 2003). This view is strengthened by
studies like Koelsch et al. (2002) demonstrating that important language areas are involved
in processing music.
However, while speech is highly dependent on rapidly changing broadband sounds,
small and precise changes in frequency have to be differentiated in order to process
tonal patterns in music: Whereas temporal differences as small as 20 ms are needed to
process rapidly changing energy peaks characteristic of many speech consonants in
language (Tallal, Miller, & Fitch, 1993), melodies with note durations shorter than
about 160 ms are difficult to identify (R. M. Warren, Gardner, Brubaker, & Bashford,
1991). Since there is a trade-of between spectral and temporal resolution there is some
functional specialization of the primary auditory cortex (cf. Liegeois-Chauvel, Giraud,
Badier, Marquis, & Chauvel, 2001; Poeppel, 2003; Zatorre, 2001; Zatorre & Belin,
2001; Zatorre, Belin, & Penhune, 2002): Left auditory areas preferentially extract information
from short (20 to 50 ms) integration windows and are, therefore, superior in
temporal processing. In contrast, their right homologues are preferentially involved in
spectral processing (pitch, prosody) with longer (150 to 250 ms) integration windows.
Language prosody and music
In accordance with these ideas, Friederici and Alter (2004) hypothesized a rough distinction
of processing segmental vs. suprasegmental speech information related to the
distinction between the two hemispheres: While segmental, lexical and syntactic infor-