Processing structure in language and music: a case for shared reliance on cognitive control

Abstract

The relationship between structural processing in music and language has received increasing interest in the last several years, spurred by the influential Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH;Patel, 2003). According to this resource-sharing framework, music and language rely on separable syntactic representations but recruit shared cognitive resources to integrate these representations into evolving structures. The SSIRH is supported by findings of interactions between structural manipulations in music and language. However, other recent evidence suggests that such interactions can also arise with non-structural manipulations, and some recent neuroimaging studies report largely non-overlapping neural regions involved in processing musical and linguistic structure. These conflicting results raise the question of exactly what shared (and distinct) resources underlie musical and linguistic structural processing. This paper suggests that one shared resource is prefrontal cortical mechanisms of cognitive control, which are recruited to detect and resolve conflict that occurs when expectations are violated and interpretations must be revised. By this account, musical processing involves not just the incremental processing and integration of musical elements as they occur, but also the incremental generation of musical predictions and expectations, which must sometimes be overridden and revised in light of evolving musical input.

A Commentary on: “Neural overlap in processing music and speech”

“…While the aforementioned fMRI paradigms investigate whether shared neural circuitry is extensive enough to be visible in fMRI, studies like those in Table 1 investigate the functional relevance of shared resources (e.g., in terms of behavioral outcomes). Given the support for the latter, an important debate has centered on the functional role of shared resources, such as involvement in structural processing (Patel, 2003 ), general attention (e.g., Perruchet and Poulin-Charronnat, 2013 ), or cognitive control (Slevc and Okada, 2015 ). This debate would surely benefit from a variety of approaches which reveal the time-course, oscillatory, and network dynamics (e.g., via electrophysiological measures of brain activity), as well as the causal role of associated brain areas (e.g., via transcranial magnetic stimulation).…”

Is there a domain-general cognitive structuring system? Evidence from structural priming across music, math, action descriptions, and language

“…Importantly, a priming effect would strongly suggest that processing in one modality affects processing in another one (i.e., a causal conclusion) and it would do so without the added complications of having a dual-task setup and unexpected musical and/or linguistic stimuli as is typical in current unexpectancy-based interference paradigms. The latter aspect is particularly important in light of recent proposals that consider the shared resources of the SSIRH as resources for error processing and repairing (Slevc & Okada, 2015).…”

The relationship between the neural computations for speech and music perception is context-dependent: an activation likelihood estimate study

“…There is a rich literature of electrophysiological and behavioral work regarding the relationship between music and language (for reviews see Besson et al, 2011 ; Koelsch, 2011 ; Patel, 2012 , 2013 ; Tillmann, 2012 ; Slevc and Okada, 2015 ). This work has provided numerous pieces of evidence of overlap between the neural resources of speech and music, including in the brainstem, auditory cortex and frontal cortical regions (Koelsch, 2011 ).…”