A biological study of the relationship between language and music

The question of the neural and cognitive relation of music and language has fascinated generations of scholars from disciplines as diverse as poetics and neuroscience. A systematic empirical investigation of the issue, however, has been lacking. The four studies in this thesis initiate a process of organized investigation into the biological relationship between language and music.;The first study is a critical literature review of the neuropsychological relation between speech and music perception. Different aspects of musical structure are examined in turn (e.g., melodic contour, pitch categorization, metrical organization), to determine which are most likely to be processed by mechanisms also involved in speech perception.;The second study examines the relation between the processing of speech intonation and musical melody. A new technique is presented for testing the perception of these two forms of acoustic signals in a comparable way. The study focuses on rare "amusic" individuals who appear to have selective music-perception deficits following bilateral cortical damage. The results suggest that the perception of speech intonation and melodic contour rely on similar brain regions.;The third study examines event-related brain potentials during the processing of linguistic and musical structural relations. These brain potentials are found to be surprisingly similar, suggesting that structural integration processes in speech and music may share neural resources.;The last study takes a different approach to speech-music relations, focusing on the acoustic and kinematic analysis of regularly-timed speech. The study explores several hypotheses about the perceptual cues employed in regulating temporal intervals in spoken language. Special attention is given to a new hypothesis about the role of segmental phonetic information in speech timing. The results falsify hypotheses based on signal energy and articulatory movement. The segmental-information hypothesis is also falsified, but a modification based on informational asymmetry in the syllable may hold promise.;Speech and music appear to share significant relations in both physical structure and neural processing. Studying the two in parallel allows an exploration of their overlap, and provides novel ways of illuminating what is unique to each domain.