Neural overlap in processing music and speech

Abstract

Neural overlap in processing music and speech, as measured by the co-activation of brain regions in neuroimaging studies, may suggest that parts of the neural circuitries established for language may have been recycled during evolution for musicality, or vice versa that musicality served as a springboard for language emergence. Such a perspective has important implications for several topics of general interest besides evolutionary origins. For instance, neural overlap is an important premise for the possibility of music training to influence language acquisition and literacy. However, neural overlap in processing music and speech does not entail sharing neural circuitries. Neural separability between music and speech may occur in overlapping brain regions. In this paper, we review the evidence and outline the issues faced in interpreting such neural data, and argue that converging evidence from several methodologies is needed before neural overlap is taken as evidence of sharing.

Keywords: fMRI; music; neural overlap; speech.

Figure 1.

Results of a Google Scholar search. The search was performed on 11 July 2014 using the keywords ‘(neural) AND (overlap OR sharing) AND (music) AND (language OR speech)’, with the number of search results plotted per year (non-cumulative).

Figure 2.

(a) Statistical map showing voxels within the temporal lobe with stronger responses to musical stimuli than to human voice (including speech). (b) Left and right cluster-averaged parameter estimates, showing that responses to speech were smaller than to music but were significantly larger compared with human non-vocal stimuli (all pairwise comparisons significant, p < 0.005). Data from Angulo-Perkins [22]. (Online version in colour.)