A review of the speech-music continuum and its categorization: Evolution, form, and function

Abstract

Historically, scholarship has taken the intuitive stance that music and language are distinct from each other, whether that difference lies in their physical or representational form, their associated cognitive processes, or their behavioural or even evolutionary function. But the two domains have numerous commonalities and shared processes, and indeed there plentiful examples which might be characterized as intermediates on a speech-music continuum. This review integrates findings about the relationship between music and language from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and comparative approaches, discussing evidence for a speech-music continuum evolutionarily, computationally and cognitively. Ultimately, it synthesizes this evidence into a general, testable model of the continuum, from speech to song to non-vocal music with intermediates along the way.