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A same-different task was used to test the hypothesis that musical expertise improves the discrimination of tonal and segmental (consonant, vowel) variations in a tone language, Mandarin Chinese. Two four-word sequences (prime and target) were presented to French musicians and nonmusicians unfamiliar with Mandarin, and event-related brain potentials were recorded. Musicians detected both tonal and segmental variations more accurately than nonmusicians. Moreover, tonal variations were associated with higher error rate than segmental variations and elicited an increased N2/N3 component that developed 100 msec earlier in musicians than in nonmusicians. Finally, musicians also showed enhanced P3b components to both tonal and segmental variations. These results clearly show that musical expertise influenced the perceptual processing as well as the categorization of linguistic contrasts in a foreign language. They show positive music-to-language transfer effects and open new perspectives for the learning of tone languages.

Learning a musical piece requires the development of a strong linkage between sensory and motor representations. Audition plays a central role and a tight cortical auditory-motor corepresentation is a characteristic feature of music processing. Recent works have indicated the establishment of a functional connection between auditory and motor cortices during the learning of a novel piece, although no causal relation has yet been demonstrated. Here transcranial magnetic stimulation of the cortical motor representation involved in musical performance was used to test excitability changes in piano players during auditory presentation of a rehearsed and a non-rehearsed piece. Results showed an increased motor excitability for the rehearsed but not for the non-rehearsed piece. Moreover, we observed an increase of excitability over time as intracortical facilitation was already present after 30 min of training whereas cortico-spinal facilitation increased after a longer training period (5 days).

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether abrupt onsets are capable of reflexively capturing attention when they occur outside the current focus of spatial attention, as would be expected if exogenous orienting operates in a truly automatic fashion. The authors established a highly focused attentional state by means of the central presentation of a stream of visual or auditory characters, which participants sometimes had to monitor. No intramodal reflexive cuing effects were observed in either audition or vision when participants performed either an exogenous visual or auditory orthogonal cuing task together with the central focused attention task. These results suggest that reflexive unimodal orienting is not truly automatic. The fact that cuing effects were eliminated under both unimodal and cross-modal conditions is consistent with the view that auditory and visual reflexive spatial orienting are controlled by a common underlying neural substrate.

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