Music and speech prosody: a common rhythm

Abstract

Disorders of music and speech perception, known as amusia and aphasia, have traditionally been regarded as dissociated deficits based on studies of brain damaged patients. This has been taken as evidence that music and speech are perceived by largely separate and independent networks in the brain. However, recent studies of congenital amusia have broadened this view by showing that the deficit is associated with problems in perceiving speech prosody, especially intonation and emotional prosody. In the present study the association between the perception of music and speech prosody was investigated with healthy Finnish adults (n = 61) using an on-line music perception test including the Scale subtest of Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) and Off-Beat and Out-of-key tasks as well as a prosodic verbal task that measures the perception of word stress. Regression analyses showed that there was a clear association between prosody perception and music perception, especially in the domain of rhythm perception. This association was evident after controlling for music education, age, pitch perception, visuospatial perception, and working memory. Pitch perception was significantly associated with music perception but not with prosody perception. The association between music perception and visuospatial perception (measured using analogous tasks) was less clear. Overall, the pattern of results indicates that there is a robust link between music and speech perception and that this link can be mediated by rhythmic cues (time and stress).

Keywords: MBEA; music perception; speech prosody perception; visuospatial perception; word stress.

Figure 1

Example of the spectrum of a compound word (above; audio file 1) and a two-word phrase (audio file 2) with f0 (black line) and intensity (red line) contours. The scale is 9–400 Hz for f0 and 0–100 dB for intensity.

Figure 2

Example of the word stress task. The left picture represents a compound word “kissankello” and the right picture a phrase “kissan kello.”

Figure 3

Example of the visuospatial task with the original sequence of Gabor figures (A) and a sequence with a change in the location and orientation of one of the Gabor figures (B). Note that in the actual test, only a single Gabor was presented at a time.

Figure 4

Distributions of the music perception subtest and total scores.

Figure 5

Scatter plots indicating the relationships between the three music perception subtests.

Figure 6

Scatter plots indicating the relationships between the word stress task and the music perception test.