Does It Really Matter? Separating the Effects of Musical Training on Syntax Acquisition

Garvin Brod,Bertram Opitz

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00543

Abstract

The possible transfer of musical expertise to the acquisition of syntactical structures in first and second language has emerged recently as an intriguing topic in the research of cognitive processes. However, it is unlikely that the benefits of musical training extend equally to the acquisition of all syntactical structures. As cognitive transfer presumably requires overlapping processing components and brain regions involved in these processing components, one can surmise that transfer between musical ability and syntax acquisition would be limited to structural elements that are shared between the two. We propose that musical expertise transfers only to the processing of recursive long-distance dependencies inherent in hierarchical syntactic structures. In this study, we taught fifty-six participants with widely varying degrees of musical expertise the artificial language BROCANTO, which allows the direct comparison of long-distance and local dependencies. We found that the quantity of musical training (measured in accumulated hours of practice and instruction) explained unique variance in performance in the long-distance dependency condition only. These data suggest that musical training facilitates the acquisition specifically of hierarchical syntactic structures.

Highlights

Several recent studies have examined transfer effects of musical training to language proficiency
As cognitive transfer presumably requires overlapping processing components and brain regions involved in these processing components, one can surmise that transfer between musical ability and syntax acquisition would be limited to structural elements that are shared between the two
We argue that people with a high amount of musical training should have an advantage in the acquisition of long-distance dependencies, but would not differ from people with a low amount of musical training with respect to the acquisition of local dependency structures

Summary

Introduction

Several recent studies have examined transfer effects of musical training to language proficiency. To analyze harmonic progressions in tonal music on different structural levels, Rohrmeier (2011) proposed a hierarchically organized set of rules in analogy to linguistic syntax using parse trees He pointed out that Western tonal music and linguistic syntax share some key organizing principles, e.g., recursivity, hierarchical organization, and long-distance dependencies, whereas other principles, like valence or case assignment, seem to be exclusively found in language (for an extensive argument, see Rohrmeier, 2011). In line with this account, a recent behavioral study revealed that reading times for syntactically, but not for semantically, irregular words were increased when presented together with a music-syntactic violation (Slevc et al, 2009). Using MEG (Maess et al, 2001) and fMRI (Tillmann et al, 2006) it was demonstrated that processing musical syntax is linked to the inferior frontal cortex, especially Broca’s Area

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