2012 Theses Bachelor's

Shared Neural Resources for Expectancy Generation in Language and Music Processes: A fMRI and EEG Study with Actors and Violinists

Hertzog, Elizabeth Bridges

In terms of music and language, the underlying networks that serve both kinds of processing may not be as separate as once believed. Broca's area and premotor regions are elicited for both musical and linguistic processing. When chords are seen as following theoretical rules of syntax in chord sequences, violations of that syntax elicit P600s just as they do in linguistic syntactic violations. N400s are elicited in the context of linguistic semantics whereas N500s are elicited in the context of musical semantics. Surprisingly, P300s are elicited when examining linguistic and musical expectancies. All of the above evidence is compiled for a better understanding of the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis as well as the general shared resources recruited in both music and linguistic processing.