The relationship between structural processing in music and language has received increasing interest in the last several years, spurred by the influential Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH;Patel, 2003). According to this resource-sharing framework, music and language rely on separable syntactic representations but recruit shared cognitive resources to integrate these representations into evolving structures. The SSIRH is supported by findings of interactions between structural manipulations in music and language. However, other recent evidence suggests that such interactions can also arise with non-structural manipulations, and some recent neuroimaging studies report largely non-overlapping neural regions involved in processing musical and linguistic structure. These conflicting results raise the question of exactly what shared (and distinct) resources underlie musical and linguistic structural processing. This paper suggests that one shared resource is prefrontal cortical mechanisms of cognitive control, which are recruited to detect and resolve conflict that occurs when expectations are violated and interpretations must be revised. By this account, musical processing involves not just the incremental processing and integration of musical elements as they occur, but also the incremental generation of musical predictions and expectations, which must sometimes be overridden and revised in light of evolving musical input.

Learning and performing music draw on a host of cognitive abilities, and previous research has postulated that musicians might have advantages in related cognitive processes. One such aspect of cognition that may be related to musical training is executive functions (EFs), a set of top-down processes that regulate behavior and cognition according to task demands. Previous studies investigating the link between musical training and EFs have yielded mixed results and are difficult to compare. In part, this is because most studies have looked at only one specific cognitive process, and even studies looking at the same process have used different experimental tasks. Furthermore, most correlational studies have used different "musician" and "non-musician" categorizations for their comparisons, so generalizing the findings is difficult. The present study provides a more comprehensive assessment of how individual differences in musical training relate to latent measures of three separable aspects of EFs. We administered a well-validated EF battery containing multiple tasks tapping the EF components of inhibition, shifting, and working memory updating (Friedman et al. in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137, 201-225, 2008), as well as a comprehensive, continuous measure of musical training and sophistication (Müllensiefen et al., in PLoS ONE, 9, e89642, 2014). Musical training correlated with some individual EF tasks involving inhibition and working memory updating, but not with individual tasks involving shifting. However, musical training only predicted the latent variable of working memory updating, but not the latent variables of inhibition or shifting after controlling for IQ, socioeconomic status, and handedness. Although these data are correlational, they nonetheless suggest that musical experience places particularly strong demands specifically on working memory updating processes.

The relationship between structural processing in music and language has received increasing interest in the last several years, spurred by the influential Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH; Patel, 2003). According to this resource-sharing framework, music and language rely on separable syntactic representations but recruit shared cognitive resources to integrate these representations into evolving structures. The SSIRH is supported by findings of interactions between structural manipulations in music and language. However, other recent evidence suggests that such interactions can also arise with non-structural manipulations, and some recent neuroimaging studies report largely non-overlapping neural regions involved in processing musical and linguistic structure. These conflicting results raise the question of exactly what shared (and distinct) resources underlie musical and linguistic structural processing. This paper suggests that one shared resource is prefrontal cortical mechanisms of cognitive control, which are recruited to detect and resolve conflict that occurs when expectations are violated and interpretations must be revised. By this account, musical processing involves not just the incremental processing and integration of musical elements as they occur, but also the incremental generation of musical predictions and expectations, which must sometimes be overridden and revised in light of evolving musical input.

Learning and performing music draw on a host of cognitive abilities, and previous research postulates that musicians might have advantages in related cognitive processes. One such aspect of cognition that may be related to musical training is executive functions (EFs), a set of top-down processes that regulate behavior and cognition according to task demands.Previous studies investigating the link between musical training and EFs have yielded mixed results and are difficult to compare. In part, this is because most studies look at only one specific cognitive process, and even studies looking at the same process use different experimental tasks.Furthermore, most correlational studies use different categorizations of "musician" and "nonmusician" for comparisons, so generalizing findings is difficult. The current study provides a more comprehensive assessment of how individual differences in musical training relate to latent measures of three separable aspects of EFs. We administered a well-validated EF battery containing multiple tasks tapping EF components of inhibition, shifting, and working memory updating (Friedman et al., 2008) and a comprehensive, continuous measure of musical training and sophistication (Müllensiefen et al., 2014). Musical training correlated with some individual EF tasks involving inhibition and working memory updating, but not individual tasks involving shifting. However, musical training only predicted the latent variable of working memory updating, but not latent variables of inhibition or shifting after controlling for IQ, socioeconomic status, and handedness. Although these data are correlational, they nonetheless suggest that musical experience places particularly strong demands specifically on working memory updating processes.

This is a preprint of a chapter on musical training and executive function to appear in "An Integrative Approach to Cognitive and Working Memory Training: Perspectives from Psychology, Neuroscience, and Human Development" edited by M. Bunting, J. Novick, M. Dougherty, and R. W. Engle.

Evidence for shared processing of structure (or syntax) in language and in music conflicts with neuropsychological dissociations between the two. However, while harmonic structural processing can be impaired in patients with spared linguistic syntactic abilities (Peretz, I. (1993). Auditory atonalia for melodies. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 10, 21-56. doi:10.1080/02643299308253455), evidence for the opposite dissociation-preserved harmonic processing despite agrammatism-is largely lacking. Here, we report one such case: HV, a former musician with Broca's aphasia and agrammatic speech, was impaired in making linguistic, but not musical, acceptability judgments. Similarly, she showed no sensitivity to linguistic structure, but normal sensitivity to musical structure, in implicit priming tasks. To our knowledge, this is the first non-anecdotal report of a patient with agrammatic aphasia demonstrating preserved harmonic processing abilities, supporting claims that aspects of musical and linguistic structure rely on distinct neural mechanisms.

This chapter focuses on the possibility that music training could serve as a type of cognitive training. Music is an interesting potential avenue for cognitive training not only because music learning and processing are likely to draw heavily on executive function abilities, but also because musical experience has its own intrinsic rewards. This suggests that music training might serve as a particularly enjoyable and rewarding route to cognitive training. The authors describe some theoretical reasons to expect a strong relationship between executive function and music, describe the small body of work that has experimentally assessed the possibility that musical experience might transfer to executive function abilities, and finally recommend ways in which a music training program might strengthen cognitive abilities.

Previous research has found that the musical intervals found in speech are associated with various emotions. Intervals can be classified by their level of consonance or dissonance—how pleasant or unpleasant the combined tones sound to the ear. Exploratory investigations have indicated that in an agreeable conversation, the pitches of the last word in an utterance and the first word of a conversation partner’s utterance are consonantly related; in a disagreeable conversation, the two pitches are dissonantly related. The present results showed that the intervals between the tonics of the utterances in a conversation corresponded to the agreement between interlocutors.