The human language system, including its inferior frontal component in “Broca’s area,” does not support music perception

Abstract

Language and music are two human-unique capacities whose relationship remains debated. Some have argued for overlap in processing mechanisms, especially for structure processing. Such claims often concern the inferior frontal component of the language system located within “Broca’s area.” However, others have failed to find overlap. Using a robust individual-subject fMRI approach, we examined the responses of language brain regions to music stimuli, and probed the musical abilities of individuals with severe aphasia. Across 4 experiments, we obtained a clear answer: music perception does not engage the language system, and judgments about music structure are possible even in the presence of severe damage to the language network. In particular, the language regions’ responses to music are generally low, often below the fixation baseline, and never exceed responses elicited by nonmusic auditory conditions, like animal sounds. Furthermore, the language regions are not sensitive to music structure: they show low responses to both intact and structure-scrambled music, and to melodies with vs. without structural violations. Finally, in line with past patient investigations, individuals with aphasia, who cannot judge sentence grammaticality, perform well on melody well-formedness judgments. Thus, the mechanisms that process structure in language do not appear to process music, including music syntax.

Driving and suppressing the human language network using large language models

“…We note that although we trained the encoding model using the responses in the LH language network as a whole, the five individual LH language fROIs showed highly correlated responses across the baseline set ( SI 4 ; and Results; Language regions exhibit high stimulus-related activity ) and similar condition-level responses to the drive , suppress , and baseline sentences ( SI 15F ) (see SI 15G for evidence that this pattern of responses to drive, suppress , and baseline sentences is not ubiquitously present across the brain). These inter-fROI similarities align well with past work showing similar modulation of the different language areas by diverse linguistic manipulations (e.g., 10,11,14,15,17,21,58–60 ).…”

“…First, we here studied the language network-comprised of three frontal and two temporal areas-as a whole. There are good reasons to adopt this approach: the different regions of this network i) have similar functional response profiles, both with respect to their selectivity for language (e.g., [13][14][15]17,18 ) and their responses to linguistic manipulations (e.g., 21,152 ), and ii) exhibit highly correlated time courses during naturalistic cognition paradigms (e.g., 80,82,153,127,154,11 ). However, some functional heterogeneity has been argued to exist within the language network (e.g., 30,29,32,151,155,156 ).…”

“…Reading and understanding this sentence engages a set of left-lateralized frontal and temporal brain regions. These interconnected areas, or the 'language network' (e.g., [1][2][3] ), a) support both comprehension and production of spoken, written, and signed linguistic utterances (e.g., 4,2,[5][6][7][8][9][10] ) across diverse languages 11,12 ; b) are highly selective for language relative to diverse nonlinguistic inputs (e.g., [13][14][15][16][17] ; see 18 for a review); c) are sensitive to linguistic structure at many levels (e.g., 2,14,6,[19][20][21]18,10 ); and d) are causally important for language such that their damage leads to linguistic deficits [22][23][24][25][26][27][28] . However, many aspects of the representations and algorithms that support language comprehension remain unknown.…”

The Neural Basis of Tonal Processing in Music: An ALE Meta-Analysis

“…From these perspectives, the role of the frontal operculum in both tonal processing and prosody might be interpreted in terms of domain-general hierarchical processing (see also Heffner & Slevc, 2015 for discussions about hierarchical structure of music and prosody). Thus, future research on the relationship between music and prosody, especially a direct quantitative comparison, may contribute to clarifying the relationship between language and music in terms of hierarchical processing (Chen et al, 2021) and thus inform the current domain-generality vs. -specificity discussion in cognitive neuroscience in an important way (Asano et al, 2022).…”

Interpreting Rhythm as Parsing: Syntactic‐Processing Operations Predict the Migration of Visual Flashes as Perceived During Listening to Musical Rhythms

“…Finally, behavioral (Fedorenko et al, 2009;Fiveash & Pammer, 2012;Slevc et al, 2009;Van de Cavey & Hartsuiker, 2016) and neuroscientific evidence (Calma-Roddin & Drury, 2020;Koelsch, 2006;Koelsch, Maess, & Friederici, 2000;Maess et al, 2001;Patel et al, 1998) suggests that linguistic and music syntactic processing share neural resources at Marr's implementational level (however, see Chen et al, 2023, for a contrasting view). The theoretical framework presented here is largely independent of whether the hypothesized computational and algorithmic features shared by linguistic and musical processing are implemented by the same neural resources.…”