Neural Substrates for Linguistic and Musical Abilities: a Neurolinguist's Perspective 1

To many, music and language are hallmarks of humanity. Moreover, they seem to share formal properties: musical and linguistic expressions appear to be complex and rule governed, and their meaning seems compositionally determined. These apparent commonalities are among the reasons that have led some to wonder whether the abilities to produce and perceptually analyze linguistic and musical expressions are formally similar, and whether they have a common neural 2 substrate. In this paper, I consider what would be required to demonstrate that language and music are cognitively and neurologically separable, proceed to a critical review the relevant literature, and propose a new experimental paradigm for the study of pitch accent, an element that has played an important role in recent studies. The basic idea is to replace the prevalent pitch discrimination paradigm with one based on sentence verification, in which semantic focus (marked by pitch accent), and only that associates to it, are used as a research tool. It is tempting to say that musical and linguistic abilities, likely among the hallmarks of humanity, are similar. What comes to mind are not only formal properties and processing routines that these two abilities may share, but also, common brain mechanisms. In this chapter, I consider the logic of inquiry and the current state of empirical evidence as they pertain to the quest for common neural bases for language and music. I first try to enumerate the properties that any cognitive ability akin to language should possess (section 1), and move to a brief consideration of the neurological argument for the modularity of language from music (section 2). I then proceed to a critical review of studies that have investigated gross double dissociations between music/language (section 3). In section 4, I focus on studies of pitch discrimination in amusia, which I critique (section 5). In section 6, I propose a novel experimental paradigm for the study of pitch in language. Sensitive to past criticisms, I show that this paradigm escapes 3 them. The paradigm, which I present in detail, is based on semantic considerations, specifically on the claim that only associates with focus (expressed via pitch accent). When an element in a sentence is focused, a set of alternative meanings emerges; only is a function that picks certain alternatives out of the focus set, and negates them. This paradigm helps to create minimal sentence pairs that need not be compared in order …