According to prevailing views, brain organization is modulated by practice, e.g., during musical or linguistic training. Most recent results, using both neuropsychological tests and brain measures, revealed an intriguing connection between musical aptitude and second language linguistic abilities. A significant relationship between higher musical aptitude, better second language pronunciation s...

Abilities related to musical aptitude appear to have a long history in human evolution. To elucidate the molecular and evolutionary background of musical aptitude, we compared genome-wide genotyping data (641 K SNPs) of 148 Finnish individuals characterized for musical aptitude. We assigned signatures of positive selection in a case-control setting using three selection methods: haploPS, XP-EHH...

UNLABELLED Recent findings have shown that people with higher musical aptitude were also better in oral language imitation tasks. However, whether singing capacity and instrument playing contribute differently to the imitation of speech has been ignored so far. Research has just recently started to understand that instrumentalists develop quite distinct skills when compared to vocalists. In the...

Perceiving music and language seems to depend upon subtle and accurate auditory processing skills. Could music and language also share common neural resources? Possible interaction between music and speech memory systems has not been ruled out. On the contrary, there is increasing evidence pointing out the accuracy at perceiving phonetic contrasts in native or foreign language of subjects with ...

Abstract The Language Aptitude Outside the Classroom (LAOC) study investigates factors that contribute to successful English-learning among newly arrived parent-child immigrants. Two types of are considered: cognitive abilities (aptitude measured with LLAMA tests and working memory) contextual-affective (exposure anxiety). Participants pairs Spanish-speaking immigrants in US. Each pair consists...