Sharing and Nonsharing of Brain Resources for Language and Music

Several theoretical and practical issues in cognitive neuroscience motivate research into the relations of language and music in the brain. Such research faces a puzzle. Currently, evidence for striking dissociations between language and music coexists with evidence for similar processing mechanisms (e.g., Peretz 2006; Patel 2008). The intent of this chapter is to initiate a dialog about how such confl icting results can be reconciled. Clearly, a coherent picture of language–music relations in the brain requires a framework that can explain both kinds of evidence. Such a framework should also generate hypothesis to guide future research. As a step toward such a framework, three distinct ways are put forth in which language and music can be dissociated by neurological abnormalities, yet have closely related cortical processing mechanisms. It is proposed that this relationship can occur when the two domains use a related functional computation and this computation relies on (a) the same brain network, but one domain is much more robust to impairments in this network than the other, (b) the interaction of shared brain networks with distinct, domain-specifi c brain networks, or (c) separate but anatomically homologous brain networks in opposite cerebral hemispheres. These proposals are used to explore relations between language and music in the processing of relative pitch, syntactic structure, and word articulation in speech versus song, respectively. Background: Why Study Language–Music Relations in the Brain? From the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, there are at least fi ve distinct reasons to study language–music relations. Such studies are relevant to (a) comparative research on the neurobiological foundations of language, (b) debates over the modularity of cognitive processing, (c) evolutionary questions surrounding the origins of language and music, (d) the clinical use of From “Language, Music, and the Brain,” edited by Michael A. Arbib. 2013. Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 10, J. Lupp, series ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 978-0-262-01810-4.