PATM Music And Language

Question 1

1. Language and music: Similarities
   and Differences have been the
   subject of much thought. Name six names.

Answer 1

1. Plato: a philosopher, as well as mathematician, in Classical Greece and an influential figure in philosophy, central in Western philosophy. He was Socrates’ student, and founded the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.
2. Darwin: an English naturalistand geologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary theory
3. **Galileo: **an Italian physicist, mathematician, engineer,astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution.
4. **Rousseau: **an important figure in the history of philosophy, both because of his contributions to political philosophy and moral psychology.
5. **Wittgenstein: **an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, thephilosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
6. Bernstein: a British sociologist known for his work in the sociology of education.

Question 2

2. What did Dunbar (1996) speculate?

Answer 2

• Dunbar (1996) speculated that music may have played an important role in the lives of early homo-sapiens
• Changes in group sizes and bodily changes
• Vocal Grooming may have improved group cohesiveness and increased survival

Question 3

3. Evidence for a shared pathway?

Answer 3

We utilise similar emotion cues across music and language domains

Juslin & Laukka (2003) reviewed 104 studies on vocal expression and 41 studies of music performance (vocal and instrumental)

Found substantial overlap in types of acoustic cues used to convey **emotions in speech and music **

Question 4

4. List how Anger can be expressed in Musical Expression and Vocal Expression.

Answer 4

Question 5

5. List how Tenderness can be expressed in Musical Expression and Vocal Expression.

Answer 5

Question 6

6. List how Happiness can be expressed in Musical Expression and Vocal Expression.

Answer 6

Question 7

7. List how Fear can be expressed in Musical Expression and Vocal Expression.

Answer 7

Question 8

8. Describe the structure of Language with a diagram.

Answer 8

Question 9

9. What is a phoneme?

Answer 9

Phonemes are smallest separate sound. Includes consonants and letter combinations (th/sh)

“That” is a 3 phoneme word (th/a/t)

English uses around 40 phonemes. Different languages use between 15 and 80 of the 100 available

Question 10

10. What are Morphemes?

Answer 10

Smallest unit of meaning in language.

Dog
Log
Ball
S (meaning plural)

Pre

Un

ed

Question 11

11. What are the differences between musical and linguistic syntax?

Answer 11

Grammatical categories (verbs, nouns etc) only in language.

The two domains also differ on constituent structure of syntactic linguistic trees

Question 12

12. What makes up musical syntax and is it complex?

Answer 12

• Musical syntax is extremely complex and has multiple levels of organisation
• Scale structure
• Chord structure
• Key structure
• Hierarchical structure of sequences that unfold over the period of the composition

Question 13

13. What did Juslin & Laukka (2003) show in a study?

Answer 13

• The study by Juslin & Laukka (2003) showed that we use some of the same acoustic signals to communicate basic emotions in music as in language
• But there a clearly many differences between

Question 14

14.Name some important differences distinguishing music and language

Answer 14

• Music is less specified in semantic meaning than language
• Music is obviously not meaningless but meaning is far less tangible than in language “Floating Intentionality” **(Cross, 1999) **

Question 15

15. Describe Pitch Differences

Answer 15

In music pitch has a high level of organisation at different levels

Probe Tone paradigm: Melody built around stable sets of pitch intervals – enables a hierarchy of pitch stability

Question 16

16. Describe tones in language and music.

Answer 16

• Tones in language work to get a job done – e.g. rising pitch signals a question
• Tones in music are “in love with each other”

Linguistic “Tones” do not have anything like the level of organisation that a musical waveform has.

Question 17

17. Describe pitch organisation.

Answer 17

Pitch is more highly organised in some languages than in others but it is still quite unlike music.

**Vietnamese is a tonal language. It has six tones and these change the meaning of the word used **

Question 18

18. Timbre in music is described as what?

Answer 18

McAdams & Bregman, 1979, describe timbre as “the psychoacoustician’s multidimensional wastebasket category for everything that cannot be qualified as pitch or loudness“

In music timbre is the attribute that enables us to distinguish between a clarinet and a flute when they are both playing the same note

Question 19

19. Timbre in langauge is described as what?

Answer 19

In speech timbre is the primary basis for linguistic sound categories (Patel, 2008)

• Timbral contrasts result from continuous changes in the shape of the vocal tract as sound is produced from a variety of sources

Question 20

20. Describe a word that illustrates timbral differences.

Answer 20

SLEEPY

• Alternation between consonants and vowels results in a rapid succession of timbral contrasts

Consonants and vowels have different articulations and distinct timbres.

• Vowels – open unimpeded sound
• Consonants – closed percussive

Question 21

21. Metrical differences differ explain why.

Answer 21

• Temporal periodicity is much less strict in language than in music.
• Regular periodicities in music allow for meter and this serves as a mental framework (scaffolding) for sound perception.
• Beats are not evenly spaced in speech
• However, an important point that Patel makes is that whilst Music and language have their own specialist representations (pitch intervals in music, nouns and verbs in language) they share a number of basic processing mechanisms.

Question 22

22. Describe Statistical learning/ Implicit learning.

Answer 22

Involves tracking patterns in the environment and acquiring implicit knowledge about their statistical properties

Statistical learning has been demonstrated for aspects of language (e.g.Saffran et al., 1996) and music (e.g. Krumhansl, 1990; 2000)

Infants learn a lot about language and music without any formal training

Question 23

23. Why are there suggestions that we may rely on some of the same mechanisms for learning language and music?

• Patel, Iverson & Rosenberg (2006).
• Speech corpus: short, newslike utterances read by native speakers in French and English
• Music corpus: classical instrumental music by 16 French and English composers writing at around the turn of the 20th century (Elgar, Debussy etc)

Answer 23

They extracted and analysed the pitches (not glides) and computed 2 measures of melodic statistics for each sentence.

1) Pitch height (e.g. compared to mean)
2) Variability in pitch interval size within sentences (jump in interval between successive level pitches)

The first variable (pitch height) revealed no differences between French and English for language or music.

The second variable (pitch interval sizes) showed differences between French and English.

French had significantly lower pitch interval variability than English and the music mirrored this pattern.

Quantitative differences emerged between English and French music and this reflected differences in the English and French languages

The authors invoke statistical learning of prosodic pitch patterns in explanation of their findings.

Question 24

24. Describe Shared Syntactic Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH) **(Patel, 2008) **

Answer 24

Describes the overlap between linguistic and musical syntax. Strong evidence for the existence of this overlap comes from studies, in which music-syntactic and a linguistic-syntactic irregularities were presented simultaneously.

Question 25

25. What did Steinhauer et al (1999) show?

Answer 25

Steinhauer et al (1999) showed that perception of phrase boundaries in speech associated with an Event Related Potential (ERP) component called the Closure Positive Shift (CPS).

Later studies included filtered or hummed studies to demonstrate that the CPS was sensitive to prosodic (rhythmic) rather than syntactic cues

Question 26

26. Closure positive shift (CPS) in musicians was found by who?

Answer 26

Knösche et al (2005) looked at ERP’s in response to phrase endings in musicians and found component similar to CPS

Using MEG they identified brain areas associated with generation of the CPS in music

Knösche et al (2005) suggested that CPS does not reflect detection of a phrase boundary per se, but memory and attention processes associates with shifting attention from one phrase to the next.

**Supports the SSIRH hypothesis **

Question 27

27. What do incongruities in both language and music elicit?

Answer 27

Findings from studies (using ERPs) show that incongruities in both language and music domains elicited a P600 (an event-related potential (ERP), or peak in electrical brain activity measured by electroencephalography (EEG)

Patel (2004)

The P600 reflects domain general structural integration processes in both domains

Question 28

28. Which brain areas have been shown to overlap between music and language?

Answer 28

Research shows that although musical and linguistic syntax have distinct and domain-specific syntactic representations, there is overlap in the neural resources that serve to activate and integrate these representations during syntactic processing.

Maess et al (2001) observed activation in Broca’s area and its right hemisphere homologue. This findings was replicated by Tillman et al., (2003).

Koelsch et al., (2002) observed activation in both Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas when processing musical harmony.

Question 29

29. What did Anvari el at. (2002) study?

Answer 29

Anvari et al., (2002) studied relationship between early reading skills and musical development in 4 – 5 year old children

• Reading involves mapping visual symbols onto phonemic contrasts so taps sound categorisation skills
• Findings showed that pitch discrimination (but not rhythm discrimination) predicted variance in reading ability in 5 year olds
• Supports **shared early mechanisms view **

Question 30

30. What are the linguistic benefits of music training?

Answer 30

• Wong et al., (2007) showed that musical training sharpens the sub-cortical sensory encoding of linguistic pitch patterns.
• Suggests some overlap in mechanisms that convert sound waves into discrete sound categories in music and language

Musicians response is more robust and more faithful to the dominant external pitch.

Question 31

31. Name lingusitc benefits of music training.

Answer 31

Chartrand & Belin (2006) presented musicians and non-musicians with instrumental and voice discrimination tasks

Musicians were more accurate and slower than non-musicians on both tasks.

Findings suggested that:

1) expertise gained with musical instrumental generalised to expertise with voices
(2) slower RTs in musicians may have resulted from different cognitive strategies with increased processing of auditory features and differences in verbal-auditory memory.

Question 32

32. Describe Melodic Intonation Therapy (MIT)

Answer 32

Developed and first used by Sparks, Helm , and Albert (1973) to treat aphasic patients.

Aphasic patients can often produce well-articulated linguistically accurate words while singing but not while speaking

MIT is based on the idea that areas of the brain that are not damaged can be recruited to take on the functions of those areas that are damaged.

Question 33

33. How is MIT treatment performed?

Answer 33

1) Prosodic speech patterns are translated into prosodic speech patterns using just 2 pitches (sustained speech)
2) Each syllable is tapped while phrases are intoned and repeated
3) Intensive: one and half hours a day, five days a week.

Question 34

34. What did Schlaug, Marchina & Norton (2009) investigate?

Answer 34

• Investigated the effects of MIT on 6 patients with aphasia resulting from stroke

Question 35

35. What did Schlaug, Marchina & Norton (2009) use diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) for?

Answer 35

• They used **Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) **(uses (MRI) to examine the integrity of white matter tracts (mostly interconnecting nerve fibers, or “wiring“) that are vulnerable to traumatic brain injury.

Question 36

36 What did Schlaug, Marchina & Norton (2009) focus on?

Answer 36

They focused on the Arcuate Fasiculus (AF).

This is important in the language network as it connects Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas

The AF was damaged in the Left hemisphere of the aphasic patients

Question 37

37 What results came from the Schlaug, Marchina & Norton (2009) study?

Answer 37

Results:

All six patients were scanned before and after MIT therapy

Speech outcomes showed significant improvements for all patients

All showed a significant increase in the numbers/volumes of **nerve fibers in Raf post-treatment **

Question 38

38. Is comparing language and music a strong one?

Answer 38

The comparison of language and music is very satisfactory from a psychological perspective.