Abstract
The relationship between the neurobiology of speech and music has been investigated for more than a century. There remains no widespread agreement regarding how (or to what extent) music perception utilizes the neural circuitry that is engaged in speech processing, particularly at the cortical level. Prominent models such as Patel's Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH) and Koelsch's neurocognitive model of music perception suggest a high degree of overlap, particularly in the frontal lobe, but also perhaps more distinct representations in the temporal lobe with hemispheric asymmetries. The present meta-analysis study used activation likelihood estimate analyses to identify the brain regions consistently activated for music as compared to speech across the functional neuroimaging (fMRI and PET) literature. Eighty music and 91 speech neuroimaging studies of healthy adult control subjects were analyzed. Peak activations reported in the music and speech studies were divided into four paradigm categories: passive listening, discrimination tasks, error/anomaly detection tasks and memory-related tasks. We then compared activation likelihood estimates within each category for music vs. speech, and each music condition with passive listening. We found that listening to music and to speech preferentially activate distinct temporo-parietal bilateral cortical networks. We also found music and speech to have shared resources in the left pars opercularis but speech-specific resources in the left pars triangularis. The extent to which music recruited speech-activated frontal resources was modulated by task. While there are certainly limitations to meta-analysis techniques particularly regarding sensitivity, this work suggests that the extent of shared resources between speech and music may be task-dependent and highlights the need to consider how task effects may be affecting conclusions regarding the neurobiology of speech and music.
Highlights
The relationship between the neurobiology of speech and music has been investigated and debated for nearly a century. (Henschen, 1924; Luria et al, 1965; Frances et al, 1973; Peretz, 2006; Besson et al, 2011)
Music perception interacts with morphosyntactic representations of speech: the early right anterior negativity (ERAN) ERP component sensitive to chord irregularities interacts with the left anterior negativity’s (LAN’s) response to morphosyntactic violations or irregularities (Koelsch et al, 2005; Steinbeis and Koelsch, 2008b; Koelsch, 2011)
Pairwise contrasts of passive listening to music vs. passive listening to speech were calculated to identify any brain regions that were significantly activated more by speech or music, respectively
Summary
The relationship between the neurobiology of speech and music has been investigated and debated for nearly a century. (Henschen, 1924; Luria et al, 1965; Frances et al, 1973; Peretz, 2006; Besson et al, 2011). Explicit tasks such as discrimination or error detection are often used to drive brain responses in part by increasing the subject’s attention to the stimuli and/or particular aspects of the stimuli This may be problematic: the influence of task demands on the functional neuroanatomy recruited by speech is well documented (e.g., Baker et al, 1981; Noesselt et al, 2003; Scheich et al, 2007; Geiser et al, 2008; Rogalsky and Hickok, 2009) and both speech and music processing engage domaingeneral cognitive, memory, and motor networks in likely distinct, but overlapping ways (Besson et al, 2011). The present meta-analysis addresses the following outstanding questions: (1) has functional neuroimaging identified significant distinctions between the functional neuroanatomy of speech and music and (2) how do specific types of tasks affect how music recruits speech-processing networks? We discuss the implications of our findings for future investigations of the neural computations of language and music
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