Abstract
Musical experience and tonal language experience are both associated with structural and functional changes in the brain that underlie facilitated pitch perception. We investigated whether neuronal oscillations in response to music were correlated with musical expertise and whether they reflected the language backgrounds (tonal versus nontonal, monolingual versus bilingual). We measured music processing in bilingual children (5–10 years old) from Mandarin (a tone language) households and three groups of age-matched children from non-tone language households (Bilingual Spanish-English, monolingual mainstream American English (MAE), and African American English (AAE)). Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded in an oddball paradigm with six types of music changes. We analyzed the phase locking and amplitude modulations of ongoing oscillations in the theta (4–8 Hz) alpha (8–14 Hz), beta- (14–30 Hz), and gamma- (30– 80 Hz) bands to music changes. Preliminary results suggest that musical expertise was associated with strengthened phase locking of neural oscillations to most music features. Tonal language experience was also associated with more robust phase locking. Bilingual experience alone does not show any enhancement in neural oscillation. There were no clear advantages of music processing for the bilingual experience.
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