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Considerable debate surrounds syntactic processing similarities in language and music. Yet few studies have investigated how syntax interacts with meter considering that metrical regularity varies across domains. Furthermore, there are reports on individual differences in syntactic and metrical structure processing in music and language. Thus, a direct comparison of individual variation in syntax and meter processing across domains is warranted. In a behavioral (Experiment 1) and EEG study (Experiment 2), participants engaged in syntactic processing tasks with sentence- and melody stimuli that were more or less metrically regular, and followed a preferred or non-preferred (but correct) syntactic structure. We further employed a range of cognitive diagnostic tests, parametrically indexed verbal- and musical abilities using a principal component analysis, and correlated cognitive factors with the behavioral and ERP results (Experiment 3). Based on previous results in the language domain, we expected that a regular meter would facilitate the syntactic integration of non-preferred syntax. While syntactic discrimination was better in regular than irregular meter conditions in both domains (Experiment 1), a P600 effect indicated different integration costs during the processing of syntactic complexities in the two domains (Experiment 2). Metrical regularity altered the P600 response to preferred syntax in language while it modulated non-preferred syntax processing in music. Moreover, experimental results yielded within-domain individual differences, and identified continuous metrics of musical ability more beneficial than grouping musicians or non-musicians (Experiment 3). These combined results suggest that the meter-syntax interface differs uniquely in how it forms syntactic preferences in language and music.

Joint music performance requires flexible sensorimotor coordination between self and other. Cognitive and sensory parameters of joint action—such as shared knowledge or temporal (a)synchrony—influence this coordination by shifting the balance between self-other segregation and integration. To investigate the neural bases of these parameters and their interaction during joint action, we asked pianists to play on an MR-compatible piano, in duet with a partner outside of the scanner room. Motor knowledge of the partner’s musical part and the temporal compatibility of the partner’s action feedback were manipulated. First, we found stronger activity and functional connectivity within cortico-cerebellar audio-motor networks when pianists had practiced their partner’s part before. This indicates that they simulated and anticipated the auditory feedback of the partner by virtue of an internal model. Second, we observed stronger cerebellar activity and reduced behavioral adaptation when pianists encountered subtle asynchronies between these model-based anticipations and the perceived sensory outcome of (familiar) partner actions, indicating a shift towards self-other segregation. These combined findings demonstrate that cortico-cerebellar audio-motor networks link motor knowledge and other-produced sounds depending on cognitive and sensory factors of the joint performance, and play a crucial role in balancing self-other integration and segregation.

During conversations, speech prosody provides important clues about the speaker’s communicative intentions. In many languages, a rising vocal pitch at the end of a sentence typically expresses a question function, whereas a falling pitch suggests a statement. Here, the neurophysiological basis of intonation and speech act understanding were investigated with high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to determine whether prosodic features are reflected at the neurophysiological level. Already approximately 100 ms after the sentence-final word differing in prosody, questions, and statements expressed with the same sentences led to different neurophysiological activity recorded in the event-related potential. Interestingly, low-pass filtered sentences and acoustically matched nonvocal musical signals failed to show any neurophysiological dissociations, thus suggesting that the physical intonation alone cannot explain this modulation. Our results show rapid neurophysiological indexes of prosodic communicative information processing that emerge only when pragmatic and lexico-semantic information are fully expressed. The early enhancement of question-related activity compared with statements was due to sources in the articulatory-motor region, which may reflect the richer action knowledge immanent to questions, namely the expectation of the partner action of answering the question. The present findings demonstrate a neurophysiological correlate of prosodic communicative information processing, which enables humans to rapidly detect and understand speaker intentions in linguistic interactions.

When people interact with each other, their brains synchronize. However, it remains unclear whether interbrain synchrony (IBS) is functionally relevant for social interaction or stems from exposure of individual brains to identical sensorimotor information. To disentangle these views, the current dual-EEG study investigated amplitude-based IBS in pianists jointly performing duets containing a silent pause followed by a tempo change. First, we manipulated the similarity of the anticipated tempo change and measured IBS during the pause, hence, capturing the alignment of purely endogenous, temporal plans without sound or movement. Notably, right posterior gamma IBS was higher when partners planned similar tempi, it predicted whether partners’ tempi matched after the pause, and it was modulated only in real, not in surrogate pairs. Second, we manipulated the familiarity with the partner’s actions and measured IBS during joint performance with sound. Although sensorimotor information was similar across conditions, gamma IBS was higher when partners were unfamiliar with each other’s part and had to attend more closely to the sound of the performance. These combined findings demonstrate that IBS is not merely an epiphenomenon of shared sensorimotor information but can also hinge on endogenous, cognitive processes crucial for behavioral synchrony and successful social interaction.

Complex sequential behaviors, such as speaking or playing music, entail flexible rule-based chaining of single acts. However, it remains unclear how the brain translates abstract structural rules into movements. We combined music production with multimodal neuroimaging to dissociate high-level structural and low-level motor planning. Pianists played novel musical chord sequences on a muted MR-compatible piano by imitating a model hand on screen. Chord sequences were manipulated in terms of musical harmony and context length to assess structural planning, and in terms of fingers used for playing to assess motor planning. A model of probabilistic sequence processing confirmed temporally extended dependencies between chords, as opposed to local dependencies between movements. Violations of structural plans activated the left inferior frontal and middle temporal gyrus, and the fractional anisotropy of the ventral pathway connecting these two regions positively predicted behavioral measures of structural planning. A bilateral frontoparietal network was instead activated by violations of motor plans. Both structural and motor networks converged in lateral prefrontal cortex, with anterior regions contributing to musical structure building, and posterior areas to movement planning. These results establish a promising approach to study sequence production at different levels of action representation.

Introduction: Electroencephalography (EEG) microstates are successive short time periods of stable scalp field potentials that represent spontaneous activation of brain resting-state networks. EEG microstates are assumed to mediate local activity patterns. To assess this hypothesis, we correlated momentary EEG microstate dynamics with the temporo-spectral evolution of electrocorticography (ECoG) and stereotactic EEG(SEEG) depth electrode recordings. Methods We analyzed resting-state data (5 min) from two participants with simultaneous noninvasive scalp EEG and invasive ECoG, and SEEG recordings. Data were recorded during the presurgical evaluation of pharmacoresistant epilepsusing subdural and intracranial electrodes. After standard preprocessing, we fitted microstate template maps to the scalp EEG data. Using covariance mapping with EEG microstate timelines and ECoG/SEEG temporo-spectral evolutions as input, we identified systematic changes in the activation of ECoG/SEEG local field potentials in different frequency bands (theta, alpha, beta, and high gamma) depending on the presence of a particular microstate class. Results We found a significant covariation of ECoG/SEEG spectral amplitudes with microstate timelines in all four frequency bands (p = .001, permutation test). The covariance patterns of the ECoG/SEEG electrodes during different microstates were similar for the two observed participants. Discussion To our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate distinct activation/deactivation patterns of frequency-domain ECoG local field potentials associated with simultaneously present EEG microstates.

Language comprehension depends on tight functional interactions between distributed brain regions. While these interactions are established for semantic and syntactic processes, the functional network of speech intonation – the linguistic variation of pitch – has been scarcely defined. Particularly little is known about intonation in tonal languages, in which pitch not only serves intonation but also expresses meaning via lexical tones. The present study used psychophysiological interaction analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging data to characterise the neural networks underlying intonation and tone processing in native Mandarin Chinese speakers. Participants categorised either intonation or tone of monosyllabic Mandarin words that gradually varied between statement and question and between Tone 2 and Tone 4. Intonation processing induced bilateral fronto‐temporal activity and increased functional connectivity between left inferior frontal gyrus and bilateral temporal regions, likely linking auditory perception and labelling of intonation categories in a phonological network. Tone processing induced bilateral temporal activity, associated with the auditory representation of tonal (phonemic) categories. Together, the present data demonstrate the breadth of the functional intonation network in a tonal language including higher‐level phonological processes in addition to auditory representations common to both intonation and tone., The present functional magnetic resonance imaging study investigated task‐specific functional connectivity in intonation and tone processing in Mandarin speakers.Intonation processing increased functional interactions between left inferior frontal and bilateral temporal regions and between lateral‐medial frontal regions, likely reflecting higher‐level phonological processes and verbal response preparation.Tone processing only induced bilateral temporal activity, likely associated with auditory representation of tone (phonemic) categories.

Decision-making is increasingly being recognised to play a role in learning motor skills. Understanding the neural processes regulating motor decision-making is therefore essential to identify mechanisms that contribute to motor skill learning. In decision-making tasks, the frontopolar cortex (FPC) is involved in tracking the reward of different alternative choices, as well as their reliability. Whether this FPC function extends to reward landscapes associated with a continuous movement dimension remains unknown. Here we used anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right FPC to investigate its role in reward-based motor learning. Nineteen healthy human participants completed a motor sequence learning task using trial-wise reward feedback to discover a hidden performance goal along a continuous dimension: timing. As a control condition, we modulated contralateral motor cortex (left M1) activity with tDCS, which has been shown to benefit motor skill learning but less consistently reward-based motor learning. Each active tDCS condition was contrasted to sham stimulation. Right FPC-tDCS led to faster learning primarily through a regulation of exploration, without concurrent modulation of motor noise. A Bayesian computational model revealed that following rFPC-tDCS, participants had a higher expectation of reward, consistent with their faster learning. These higher reward estimates were inferred to be less volatile, and thus participants under rFPC-tDCS deemed the mapping between movement and reward to be more stable. Relative to sham, lM1-tDCS did not significantly modulate main behavioral outcomes. The results indicate that brain regions previously linked to decision-making, such as the FPC, are relevant for motor skill learning.

Background and purpose: This study was undertaken to determine and compare lesion patterns and structural dysconnectivity underlying poststroke aprosodia and amusia, using a data-driven multimodal neuroimaging approach. Methods: Thirty-nine patients with right or left hemisphere stroke were enrolled in a cohort study and tested for linguistic and affective prosody perception and musical pitch and rhythm perception at subacute and 3-month poststroke stages. Participants listened to words spoken with different prosodic stress that changed their meaning, and to words spoken with six different emotions, and chose which meaning or emotion was expressed. In the music tasks, participants judged pairs of short melodies as the same or different in terms of pitch or rhythm. Structural magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired at both stages, and machine learning-based lesion-symptom mapping and deterministic tractography were used to identify lesion patterns and damaged white matter pathways giving rise to aprosodia and amusia. Results: Both aprosodia and amusia were behaviorally strongly correlated and associated with similar lesion patterns in right frontoinsular and striatal areas. In multiple regression models, reduced fractional anisotropy and lower tract volume of the right inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus were the strongest predictors for both disorders, over time. Conclusions: These results highlight a common origin of aprosodia and amusia, both arising from damage and disconnection of the right ventral auditory stream integrating rhythmic-melodic acoustic information in prosody and music. Comorbidity of these disabilities may worsen the prognosis and affect rehabilitation success.

Brain asymmetries for words and melodies of songs depend on opposite acoustic cues

OBJECTIVES: A major issue in the rehabilitation of children with cochlear implants (CIs) is unexplained variance in their language skills, where many of them lag behind children with normal hearing (NH). Here, we assess links between generative language skills and the perception of prosodic stress, and with musical and parental activities in children with CIs and NH. Understanding these links is expected to guide future research and toward supporting language development in children with a CI. DESIGN: Twenty-one unilaterally and early-implanted children and 31 children with NH, aged 5 to 13, were classified as musically active or nonactive by a questionnaire recording regularity of musical activities, in particular singing, and reading and other activities shared with parents. Perception of word and sentence stress, performance in word finding, verbal intelligence (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) vocabulary), and phonological awareness (production of rhymes) were measured in all children. Comparisons between children with a CI and NH were made against a subset of 21 of the children with NH who were matched to children with CIs by age, gender, socioeconomic background, and musical activity. Regression analyses, run separately for children with CIs and NH, assessed how much variance in each language task was shared with each of prosodic perception, the child's own music activity, and activities with parents, including singing and reading. All statistical analyses were conducted both with and without control for age and maternal education. RESULTS: Musically active children with CIs performed similarly to NH controls in all language tasks, while those who were not musically active performed more poorly. Only musically nonactive children with CIs made more phonological and semantic errors in word finding than NH controls, and word finding correlated with other language skills. Regression analysis results for word finding and VIQ were similar for children with CIs and NH. These language skills shared considerable variance with the perception of prosodic stress and musical activities. When age and maternal education were controlled for, strong links remained between perception of prosodic stress and VIQ (shared variance: CI, 32%/NH, 16%) and between musical activities and word finding (shared variance: CI, 53%/NH, 20%). Links were always stronger for children with CIs, for whom better phonological awareness was also linked to improved stress perception and more musical activity, and parental activities altogether shared significantly variance with word finding and VIQ. CONCLUSIONS: For children with CIs and NH, better perception of prosodic stress and musical activities with singing are associated with improved generative language skills. In addition, for children with CIs, parental singing has a stronger positive association to word finding and VIQ than parental reading. These results cannot address causality, but they suggest that good perception of prosodic stress, musical activities involving singing, and parental singing and reading may all be beneficial for word finding and other generative language skills in implanted children.

Generation of hierarchical structures, such as the embedding of subordinate elements into larger structures, is a core feature of human cognition. Processing of hierarchies is thought to rely on lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, the neural underpinnings supporting active generation of new hierarchical levels remain poorly understood. Here, we created a new motor paradigm to isolate this active generative process by means of fMRI. Participants planned and executed identical movement sequences by using different rules: a Recursive hierarchical embedding rule, generating new hierarchical levels; an Iterative rule linearly adding items to existing hierarchical levels, without generating new levels; and a Repetition condition tapping into short term memory, without a transformation rule. We found that planning involving generation of new hierarchical levels (Recursive condition vs. both Iterative and Repetition) activated a bilateral motor imagery network, including cortical and subcortical structures. No evidence was found for lateral PFC involvement in the generation of new hierarchical levels. Activity in basal ganglia persisted through execution of the motor sequences in the contrast Recursive versus Iteration, but also Repetition versus Iteration, suggesting a role of these structures in motor short term memory. These results showed that the motor network is involved in the generation of new hierarchical levels during motor sequence planning, while lateral PFC activity was neither robust nor specific. We hypothesize that lateral PFC might be important to parse hierarchical sequences in a multi‐domain fashion but not to generate new hierarchical levels.

Neurocomparative music and language research has seen major advances over the past two decades. The goal of this Special Issue “Advances in the Neurocognition of Music and Language” was to showcase the multiple neural analogies between musical and linguistic information processing, their entwined organization in human perception and cognition and to infer the applicability of the combined knowledge in pedagogy and therapy. Here, we summarize the main insights provided by the contributions and integrate them into current frameworks of rhythm processing, neuronal entrainment, predictive coding and cognitive control.

Intonation, the modulation of pitch in speech, is a crucial aspect of language that is processed in right‐hemispheric regions, beyond the classical left‐hemispheric language system. Whether or not this notion generalises across languages remains, however, unclear. Particularly, tonal languages are an interesting test case because of the dual linguistic function of pitch that conveys lexical meaning in form of tone, in addition to intonation. To date, only few studies have explored how intonation is processed in tonal languages, how this compares to tone and between tonal and non‐tonal language speakers. The present fMRI study addressed these questions by testing Mandarin and German speakers with Mandarin material. Both groups categorised mono‐syllabic Mandarin words in terms of intonation, tone, and voice gender. Systematic comparisons of brain activity of the two groups between the three tasks showed large cross‐linguistic commonalities in the neural processing of intonation in left fronto‐parietal, right frontal, and bilateral cingulo‐opercular regions. These areas are associated with general phonological, specific prosodic, and controlled categorical decision‐making processes, respectively. Tone processing overlapped with intonation processing in left fronto‐parietal areas, in both groups, but evoked additional activity in bilateral temporo‐parietal semantic regions and subcortical areas in Mandarin speakers only. Together, these findings confirm cross‐linguistic commonalities in the neural implementation of intonation processing but dissociations for semantic processing of tone only in tonal language speakers.

Neural activity phase-locks to rhythm in both music and speech. However, the literature currently lacks a direct test of whether cortical tracking of comparable rhythmic structure is comparable across domains. Moreover, although musical training improves multiple aspects of music and speech perception, the relationship between musical training and cortical tracking of rhythm has not been compared directly across domains. We recorded the electroencephalograms (EEG) from 28 participants (14 female) with a range of musical training who listened to melodies and sentences with identical rhythmic structure. We compared cerebral-acoustic coherence (CACoh) between the EEG signal and single-trial stimulus envelopes (as measure of cortical entrainment) across domains and correlated years of musical training with CACoh. We hypothesized that neural activity would be comparably phase-locked across domains, and that the amount of musical training would be associated with increasingly strong phase locking in both domains. We found that participants with only a few years of musical training had a comparable cortical response to music and speech rhythm, partially supporting the hypothesis. However, the cortical response to music rhythm increased with years of musical training while the response to speech rhythm did not, leading to an overall greater cortical response to music rhythm across all participants. We suggest that task demands shaped the asymmetric cortical tracking across domains.

The relevance of left dorsal and ventral fiber pathways for syntactic and semantic comprehension is well established, while pathways for prosody are little explored. The present study examined linguistic prosodic structure building in a patient whose right arcuate/superior longitudinal fascicles and posterior corpus callosum were transiently compromised by a vasogenic peritumoral edema. Compared to ten matched healthy controls, the patient’s ability to detect irregular prosodic structure significantly improved between pre- and post-surgical assessment. This recovery was accompanied by an increase in average fractional anisotropy (FA) in right dorsal and posterior transcallosal fiber tracts. Neither general cognitive abilities nor (non-prosodic) syntactic comprehension nor FA in right ventral and left dorsal fiber tracts showed a similar pre-post increase. Together, these findings suggest a contribution of right dorsal and inter-hemispheric pathways to prosody perception, including the right-dorsal tracking and structuring of prosodic pitch contours that is transcallosally informed by concurrent syntactic information.

Evidence is accumulating that similar cognitive resources are engaged to process syntactic structure in music and language. Congenital amusia – a neurodevelopmental disorder that primarily affects music perception, including musical syntax – provides a special opportunity to understand the nature of this overlap. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we investigated whether individuals with congenital amusia have parallel deficits in processing language syntax in comparison to control participants. Twelve amusic participants (eight females) and 12 control participants (eight females) were presented melodies in one session, and spoken sentences in another session, both of which had syntactic-congruent and -incongruent stimuli. They were asked to complete a music-related and a language-related task that were irrelevant to the syntactic incongruities. Our results show that amusic participants exhibit impairments in the early stages of both music- and language-syntactic processing. Specifically, we found that two event-related potential (ERP) components – namely Early Right Anterior Negativity (ERAN) and Left Anterior Negativity (LAN), associated with music- and language-syntactic processing respectively, were absent in the amusia group. However, at later processing stages, amusics showed similar brain responses as controls to syntactic incongruities in both music and language. This was reflected in a normal N5 in response to melodies and a normal P600 to spoken sentences. Notably, amusics' parallel music- and language-syntactic impairments were not accompanied by deficits in semantic processing (indexed by normal N400 in response to semantic incongruities). Together, our findings provide further evidence for shared music and language syntactic processing, particularly at early stages of processing., Highlights • Amusics displayed abnormal brain responses to music-syntactic irregularities. • They also exhibited abnormal brain responses to language-syntactic irregularities. • These impairments affect an early stage of syntactic processing not a later stage. • Music and language involve similar cognitive mechanisms for processing syntax.

The objective of our study was to assess alterations in speech as a possible localizing sign in frontal lobe epilepsy. Ictal speech was analyzed in 18 patients with frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE) during seizures and in the interictal period. Matched identical words were analyzed regarding alterations in fundamental frequency (ƒo) as an approximation of pitch. In patients with FLE, ƒo of ictal utterances was significantly higher than ƒo in interictal recordings (p = 0.016). Ictal ƒo increases occurred in both FLE of right and left seizure origin. In contrast, a matched temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) group showed less pronounced increases in ƒo, and only in patients with right-sided seizure foci. This study for the first time shows significant voice alterations in ictal speech in a cohort of patients with FLE. This may contribute to the localization of the epileptic focus. Increases in ƒo were interestingly found in frontal lobe seizures with origin in either hemisphere, suggesting a bilateral involvement to the planning of speech production, in contrast to a more right-sided lateralization of pitch perception in prosodic processing.

Our vocal tone—the prosody—contributes a lot to the meaning of speech beyond the actual words. Indeed, the hesitant tone of a “yes” may be more telling than its affirmative lexical meaning [1]. The human brain contains dorsal and ventral processing streams in the left hemisphere that underlie core linguistic abilities such as phonology, syntax, and semantics [2, 3 and 4]. Whether or not prosody—a reportedly right-hemispheric faculty [5 and 6]—involves analogous processing streams is a matter of debate. Functional connectivity studies on prosody leave no doubt about the existence of such streams [7 and 8], but opinions diverge on whether information travels along dorsal [9] or ventral [10 and 11] pathways. Here we show, with a novel paradigm using audio morphing combined with multimodal neuroimaging and brain stimulation, that prosody perception takes dual routes along dorsal and ventral pathways in the right hemisphere. In experiment 1, categorization of speech stimuli that gradually varied in their prosodic pitch contour (between statement and question) involved (1) an auditory ventral pathway along the superior temporal lobe and (2) auditory-motor dorsal pathways connecting posterior temporal and inferior frontal/premotor areas. In experiment 2, inhibitory stimulation of right premotor cortex as a key node of the dorsal stream decreased participants’ performance in prosody categorization, arguing for a motor involvement in prosody perception. These data draw a dual-stream picture of prosodic processing that parallels the established left-hemispheric multi-stream architecture of language, but with relative rightward asymmetry.

Sprache und Musik weisen starke Gemeinsamkeiten in ihren Struktureigenschaften auf. Dies legt nahe, dass beide auf einer gemeinsamen kognitiven und neuroanatomischen Basis beruhen. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert widerspruchliche Befunde fur oder gegen neuronale Parallelen von Sprache und Musik und argumentiert, dass die Untersuchung kognitiver Teiloperationen und die Berucksichtigung bestehender Hirnlasionen diese Befunde vereinbaren kann. Mittels Elektrokortikografie (Studie I) und funktioneller Magnetresonanztomografie (Studie II) wurden Schnittpunkte von Sprache und Musik in der Grammatikverarbeitung und Gedachtnisbildung bei Patienten mit Temporallappenepilepsie (TLE) untersucht. Studie I zeigt eine Co-Lokalisation der Grammatikverarbeitung in Sprache und Musik im bilateralen Temporallappen. Studie II zeigt bei Patienten mit linker TLE eine untypische Entkopplung von Text- und Melodiegedachtnis in Liedern. Die Ergebnisse belegen neurokognitive Schnittstellen zwischen Sprache und Musik, unterstreichen jedoch die Wichtigkeit, kognitive Teilfunktionen getrennt zu betrachten und die neurologische Gesundheit der Probanden zu berucksichtigen.

Generation of hierarchical structures, such as the embedding of subordinate elements into larger structures, is a core feature of human cognition. Discrimination of well-formed hierarchies is thought to rely on lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, the brain bases underlying the active generation of new hierarchical levels remain poorly understood. Here, we created a new motor paradigm to isolate this active generative process. In fMRI, participants planned and performed (identical) movement sequences based on three previously learned rules: (1) a hierarchical ‘fractal’ rule that involved generation of new levels, (2) a linear ‘iterative’ rule adding items to existing hierarchical levels, and (3) simple ‘repetition’. We found that generation of new hierarchical levels (using the fractal rule) activated a bilateral motor planning-and imagery network, but did not involve lateral PFC. Conversely, adding items to existing hierarchical levels required M1 directly during execution. These results show that the generation of new hierarchical levels can be achieved without involvement of putative domain-general systems such as those ascribed to lateral PFC. We hypothesize that these systems might be important to parse hierarchical sequences in a multi-domain fashion but not necessarily to generate new hierarchical levels.

It is well established that musical training induces sensorimotor plasticity. However, there are remarkable differences in how musicians train for proficient stage performance. The present EEG study outlines for the first time clear-cut neurobiological differences between classical and jazz musicians at high and low levels of action planning, revealing genre-specific cognitive strategies adopted in production. Pianists imitated chord progressions without sound that were manipulated in terms of harmony and context length to assess high-level planning of sequence-structure, and in terms of the manner of playing to assess low-level parameter specification of single acts. Jazz pianists revised incongruent harmonies faster as revealed by an earlier reprogramming negativity and beta power decrease, hence neutralising response costs, albeit at the expense of a higher number of manner errors. Classical pianists in turn experienced more conflict during incongruent harmony, as shown by theta power increase, but were more ready to implement the required manner of playing, as indicated by higher accuracy and beta power decrease. These findings demonstrate that specific demands and action focus of training lead to differential weighting of hierarchical action planning. This suggests different enduring markers impressed in the brain when a musician practices one or the other style.

Our ability to understand others’ communicative intentions in speech is key to successful social interaction. Indeed, misunderstanding an ‘excuse me’ as apology, while meant as criticism, may have important consequences. Recent behavioural studies have provided evidence that prosody, that is, vocal tone, is an important indicator for speakers’ intentions. Using a novel audio-morphing paradigm, the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined the neurocognitive mechanisms that allow listeners to ‘read’ speakers’ intents from vocal prosodic patterns. Participants categorized prosodic expressions that gradually varied in their acoustics between criticism, doubt, and suggestion. Categorizing typical exemplars of the three intentions induced activations along the ventral auditory stream, complemented by amygdala and mentalizing system. These findings likely depict the stepwise conversion of external perceptual information into abstract prosodic categories and internal social semantic concepts, including the speaker’s mental state. Ambiguous tokens, in turn, involved cingulo-opercular areas known to assist decision-making in case of conflicting cues. Auditory and decision-making processes were flexibly coupled with the amygdala, depending on prosodic typicality, indicating enhanced categorization efficiency of overtly relevant, meaningful prosodic signals. Altogether, the results point to a model in which auditory prosodic categorization and socio-inferential conceptualization cooperate to translate perceived vocal tone into a coherent representation of the speaker’s intent.

Syntactic operations in language and music are well established and known to be linked in cognitive and neuroanatomical terms. What remains a matter of debate is whether the notion of syntax also applies to human actions and how those may be linked to syntax in language and music. The present electroencephalography (EEG) study explored syntactic processes during the observation, motor programming, and execution of musical actions. Therefore, expert pianists watched and imitated silent videos of a hand playing 5-chord sequences in which the last chord was syntactically congruent or incongruent with the preceding harmonic context. 2-chord sequences that diluted the syntactic predictability of the last chord (by reducing the harmonic context) served as a control condition. We assumed that behavioural and event-related potential (ERP) effects (i.e., differences between congruent and incongruent trials) that were significantly stronger in the 5-chord compared to the 2-chord sequences are related to syntactic processing. According to this criterion, the present results show an influence of syntactic context on ERPs related to (i) action observation and (ii) the motor programming for action imitation, as well as (iii) participants’ execution times and accuracy. In particular, the occurrence of electrophysiological indices of action inhibition and reprogramming when an incongruent chord had to be imitated implies that the pianist’s motor system anticipated (and revoked) the congruent chord during action observation. Notably, this well-known anticipatory potential of the motor system seems to be strongly based upon the observer’s music-syntactic knowledge, thus suggesting the “embodied” processing of musical syntax. The combined behavioural and electrophysiological data show that the notion of musical syntax not only applies to the auditory modality but transfers e in trained musicians e to a “grammar of musical action”.

The ability to predict upcoming structured events based on long-term knowledge and contextual priors is a fundamental principle of human cognition. Tonal music triggers predictive processes based on structural properties of harmony, i.e., regularities defining the arrangement of chords into well-formed musical sequences. While the neural architecture of structure-based predictions during music perception is well described, little is known about the neural networks for analogous predictions in musical actions and how they relate to auditory perception. To fill this gap, expert pianists were presented with harmonically congruent or incongruent chord progressions, either as musical actions (photos of a hand playing chords) that they were required to watch and imitate without sound, or in an auditory format that they listened to without playing. By combining task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with functional connectivity at rest, we identified distinct sub-regions in right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) interconnected with parietal and temporal areas for processing action and audio sequences, respectively. We argue that the differential contribution of parietal and temporal areas is tied to motoric and auditory long-term representations of harmonic regularities that dynamically interact with computations in rIFG. Parsing of the structural dependencies in rIFG is co-determined by both stimulus- or task-demands. In line with contemporary models of prefrontal cortex organization and dual stream models of visual-spatial and auditory processing, we show that the processing of musical harmony is a network capacity with dissociated dorsal and ventral motor and auditory circuits, which both provide the infrastructure for predictive mechanisms optimising action and perception performance.

Song and speech represent two auditory categories the brain usually classifies fairly easily. Functionally, this classification ability may depend to a great extent on characteristic features of pitch patterns present in song melody and speech prosody. Anatomically, the temporal lobe (TL) has been discussed as playing a prominent role in the processing of both. Here we tested individuals with congenital amusia and patients with unilateral left and right TL lesions in their ability to categorize song and speech. In a forced-choice paradigm, specifically designed auditory stimuli representing sung, spoken and "ambiguous" stimuli (being perceived as "halfway between" song and speech), had to be classified as either "song" or "speech". Congenital amusics and TL patients, contrary to controls, exhibited a surprising bias to classifying the ambiguous stimuli as "song" despite their apparent deficit to correctly process features typical for song. This response bias possibly reflects a strategy where, based on available context information (here: forced choice for either speech or song), classification of non-processable items may be achieved through elimination of processable classes. This speech-based strategy masks the pitch processing deficit in congenital amusics and TL lesion patients.

Action-theoretic views of language posit that the recognition of others’ intentions is key to successful interpersonal communication. Yet, speakers do not always code their intentions literally, raising the question of which mechanisms enable interlocutors to exchange communicative intents. The present study investigated whether and how prosody—the vocal tone—contributes to the identification of “unspoken” intentions. Single (non-)words were spoken with six intonations representing different speech acts—as carriers of communicative intentions. This corpus was acoustically analyzed (Experiment 1), and behaviorally evaluated in two experiments (Experiments 2 and 3). The combined results show characteristic prosodic feature configurations for different intentions that were reliably recognized by listeners. Interestingly, identification of intentions was not contingent on context (single words), lexical information (non-words), and recognition of the speaker’s emotion (valence and arousal). Overall, the data demonstrate that speakers’ intentions are represented in the prosodic signal which can, thus, determine the success of interpersonal communication.

Shared knowledge and interpersonal coordination are prerequisites for most forms of social behavior. Influential approaches to joint action have conceptualized these capacities in relation to the separate constructs of co-representation (knowledge) and self-other entrainment (coordination). Here we investigated how brain mechanisms involved in co-representation and entrainment interact to support joint action. To do so, we used a musical joint action paradigm to show that the neural mechanisms underlying co-representation and self-other entrainment are linked via a process – indexed by EEG alpha oscillations – regulating the balance between self-other integration and segregation in real time. Pairs of pianists performed short musical items while action familiarity and interpersonal (behavioral) synchronization accuracy were manipulated in a factorial design. Action familiarity referred to whether or not pianists had rehearsed the musical material performed by the other beforehand. Interpersonal synchronization was manipulated via congruent or incongruent tempo change instructions that biased performance timing towards the impending, new tempo. It was observed that, when pianists were familiar with each other's parts, millisecond variations in interpersonal synchronized behavior were associated with a modulation of alpha power over right centro-parietal scalp regions. Specifically, high behavioral entrainment was associated with self-other integration, as indexed by alpha suppression. Conversely, low behavioral entrainment encouraged reliance on internal knowledge and thus led to self-other segregation, indexed by alpha enhancement. These findings suggest that alpha oscillations index the processing of information about self and other depending on the compatibility of internal knowledge and external (environmental) events at finely resolved timescales.

An increasing number of neuroimaging studies in music cognition research suggest that "language areas" are involved in the processing of musical syntax, but none of these studies clarified whether these areas are a prerequisite for normal syntax processing in music. The present electrophysiological experiment tested whether patients with lesions in Broca's area (N=6) or in the left anterior temporal lobe (N=7) exhibit deficits in the processing of structure in music compared to matched healthy controls (N=13). A chord sequence paradigm was applied, and the amplitude and scalp topography of the Early Right Anterior Negativity (ERAN) was examined, an electrophysiological marker of musical syntax processing that correlates with activity in Broca's area and its right hemisphere homotope. Left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (but not anterior superior temporal gyrus - aSTG) patients with lesions older than 4 years showed an ERAN with abnormal scalp distribution, and subtle behavioural deficits in detecting music-syntactic irregularities. In one IFG patient tested 7 months post-stroke, the ERAN was extinguished and the behavioural performance remained at chance level. These combined results suggest that the left IFG, known to be crucial for syntax processing in language, plays also a functional role in the processing of musical syntax. Hence, the present findings are consistent with the notion that Broca's area supports the processing of syntax in a rather domain-general way.

Summary It has long been debated which aspects of music perception are universal and which are developed only after exposure to a specific musical culture [1–5]. Here, we report a crosscultural study with participants from a native African population (Mafa) and Western participants, with both groups being naive to the music of the other respective culture. Experiment 1 investigated the ability to recognize three basic emotions (happy, sad, scared/fearful) expressed in Western music. Results show that the Mafas recognized happy, sad, and scared/fearful Western music excerpts above chance, indicating that the expression of these basic emotions in Western music can be recognized universally. Experiment 2 examined how a spectral manipulation of original, naturalistic music affects the perceived pleasantness of music in Western as well as in Mafa listeners. The spectral manipulation modified, among other factors, the sensory dissonance of the music. The data show that both groups preferred original Western music and also original Mafa music over their spectrally manipulated versions. It is likely that the sensory dissonance produced by the spectral manipulation was at least partly responsible for this effect, suggesting that consonance and permanent sensory dissonance universally influence the perceived pleasantness of music.

Human personality has brain correlates that exert manifold influences on biological processes. This study investigates relations between emotional personality and heart activity. Our data demonstrate that emotional personality is related to a specific cardiac amplitude signature in the resting electrocardiogram (ECG). Two experiments using functional magnetic resonance imaging show that this signature correlates with brain activity in the amygdala and the hippocampus during the processing of musical stimuli with emotional valence. Additionally, this cardiac signature correlates with subjective indices of emotionality (as measured by the Revised Toronto Alexithymia Scale), and with both time and frequency domain measures of the heart rate variability. The results demonstrate intricate connections between emotional personality and the heart by showing that ECG amplitude patterns provide considerably more information about an individual's emotionality than previously believed. The finding of a cardiac signature of emotional personality opens new perspectives for the investigation of relations between emotional dysbalance and cardiovascular disease.

The present study investigated music-syntactic processing with chord sequences that ended on either regular or irregular chord functions. Sequences were composed such that perceived differences in the cognitive processing between syntactically regular and irregular chords could not be due to the sensory processing of acoustic factors like pitch repetition, pitch commonality (the major component of "sensory dissonance"), or roughness. Three experiments with independent groups of subjects were conducted: a behavioral experiment and two experiments using electroencephalography. Irregular chords elicited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN) in the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) under both task-relevant and task-irrelevant conditions. Behaviorally, participants detected around 75% of the irregular chords, indicating that these chords were only moderately salient. Nevertheless, the irregular chords reliably elicited clear ERP effects. Amateur musicians were slightly more sensitive to musical irregularities than nonmusicians, supporting previous studies demonstrating effects of musical training on music-syntactic processing. The findings indicate that the ERAN is an index of music-syntactic processing and that the ERAN can be elicited even when irregular chords are not detectable based on acoustical factors such as pitch repetition, sensory dissonance, or roughness.

Complex human behavior is hierarchically organized. Whether or not syntax plays a role in this organization is currently under debate. The present ERP study uses piano performance to isolate syntactic operations in action planning and to demonstrate their priority over nonsyntactic levels of movement selection. Expert pianists were asked to execute chord progressions on a mute keyboard by copying the posture of a performing model hand shown in sequences of photos. We manipulated the final chord of each sequence in terms of Syntax (congruent/incongruent keys) and Manner (conventional/unconventional fingering), as well as the strength of its predictability by varying the length of the Context (five-chord/two-chord progressions). The production of syntactically incongruent compared to congruent chords showed a response delay that was larger in the long compared to the short context. This behavioral effect was accompanied by a centroparietal negativity in the long but not in the short context, suggesting that a syntax-based motor plan was prepared ahead. Conversely, the execution of the unconventional manner was not delayed as a function of Context and elicited an opposite electrophysiological pattern (a posterior positivity). The current data support the hypothesis that motor plans operate at the level of musical syntax and are incrementally translated to lower levels of movement selection.

Background: It is an open question whether cognitive processes of auditory perception that are mediated by functionally different cortices exhibit the same sensitivity to sedation. The auditory event-related potentials P1, mismatch negativity (MMN), and early right anterior negativity (ERAN) originate from different cortical areas and reflect different stages of auditory processing. The P1 originates mainly from the primary auditory cortex. The MMN is generated in or in the close vicinity of the primary auditory cortex but is also dependent on frontal sources. The ERAN mainly originates from frontal generators. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of increasing propofol sedation on different stages of auditory processing as reflected in P1, MMN, and ERAN. Methods: The P1, the MMN, and the ERAN were recorded preoperatively in 18 patients during four levels of anesthesia adjusted with target-controlled infusion: awake state (target concentration of propofol 0.0 g/ml), light sedation (0.5 g/ml), deep sedation (1.5 g/ml), and unconsciousness (2.5‐3.0 g/ml). Simultaneously, propofol anesthesia was assessed using the Bispectral Index. Results: Propofol sedation resulted in a progressive decrease in amplitudes and an increase of latencies with a similar pattern for MMN and ERAN. MMN and ERAN were elicited during sedation but were abolished during unconsciousness. In contrast, the amplitude of the P1 was unchanged by sedation but markedly decreased during unconsciousness. Conclusion: The results indicate differential effects of propofol sedation on cognitive functions that involve mainly the auditory cortices and cognitive functions that involve the frontal cortices. RECENT findings indicate that cognitive processes mediated by functionally different cortices (e.g., association cortex vs. primary sensory cortex) are differentially affected by anesthetic drugs. 1– 4 Nevertheless, investigations related to these phenomena are sparse, and it is an open question whether anesthesia has different effects on primary auditory processes and auditory processes that involve other than auditory cortices. Therefore, the current study investigates auditory event-related brain potentials (AERPs) during systematic sedation. The recorded AERPs reflect well-defined processing stages of the acoustic input that are mediated by different cortical structures.

Sentences, musical phrases and goal-directed actions are composed of elements that are linked by specific rules to form meaningful outcomes. In goal-directed actions including a non-canonical element or scrambling the order of the elements alters the action’s content and structure, respectively. In the present study we investigated event-related potentials of the electroencephalographic (EEG) activity recorded during observation of both alterations of the action content (obtained by violating the semantic components of an action, e.g. making coffee with cola) and alterations of the action structure (obtained by inverting the order of two temporally adjacent pictures of sequences depicting daily life actions) interfering with the normal flow of the motor acts that compose an action. Action content alterations elicited a bilateral posterior distributed EEG negativity, peaking at around 400 ms after stimulus onset similar to the ERPs evoked by semantic violations in language studies. Alteration of the action structure elicited an early left anterior negativity followed by a late left anterior positivity, which closely resembles the ERP pattern found in language syntax violation studies. Our results suggest a functional dissociation between the processing of action content and structure, reminiscent of a similar dissociation found in the language or music domains. Importantly, this study provides further support to the hypothesis that some basic mechanisms, such as the rule-based structuring of sequential events, are shared between different cognitive domains.

Contemporary neural models of auditory language comprehension proposed that the two hemispheres are differently specialized in the processing of segmental and suprasegmental features of language. While segmental processing of syntactic and lexical semantic information is predominantly assigned to the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is thought to have a primacy for the processing of suprasegmental prosodic information such as accentuation and boundary marking. A dynamic interplay between the hemispheres is assumed to allow for the timely coordination of both information types. The present event-related potential study investigated whether the anterior and/or posterior portion of the corpus callosum provide the crucial brain basis for the online interaction of syntactic and prosodic information. Patients with lesions in the anterior two-thirds of the corpus callosum connecting orbital and frontal structures, or the posterior third of the corpus callosum connecting temporal, parietal and occipital areas, as well as matched healthy controls, were tested in a paradigm that crossed syntactic and prosodic manipulations. An anterior negativity elicited by a mismatch between syntactically predicted phrase structure and prosodic intonation was analysed as a marker for syntax-prosody interaction. Healthy controls and patients with lesions in the anterior corpus callosum showed this anterior negativity demonstrating an intact interplay between syntax and prosody. No such effect was found in patients with lesions in the posterior corpus callosum, although they exhibited intact, prosody-independent syntactic processing comparable with healthy controls and patients with lesions in the anterior corpus callosum. These data support the interplay between the speech processing streams in the left and right hemispheres via the posterior portion of the corpus callosum, building the brain basis for the coordination and integration of local syntactic and prosodic features during auditory speech comprehension.

International audience; The cognitive relationship between lyrics and tunes in song is currently under debate, with some researchers arguing that lyrics and tunes are represented as separate components, while others suggest that they are processed in integration. The present study addressed this issue by means of a functional magnetic resonance adaptation paradigm during passive listening to unfamiliar songs. The repetition and variation of lyrics and/or tunes in blocks of six songs was crossed in a 2 x 2 factorial design to induce selective adaptation for each component. Reductions of the hemodynamic response were observed along the superior temporal sulcus and gyrus (STS/STG) bilaterally. Within these regions, the left mid-STS showed an interaction of the adaptation effects for lyrics and tunes, suggesting an integrated processing of the two components at prelexical, phonemic processing levels. The degree of integration decayed toward more anterior regions of the left STS, where the lack of such an interaction and the stronger adaptation for lyrics than for tunes was suggestive of an independent processing of lyrics, perhaps resulting from the processing of meaning. Finally, evidence for an integrated representation of lyrics and tunes was found in the left dorsal precentral gyrus (PrCG), possibly relating to the build-up of a vocal code for singing in which musical and linguistic features of song are fused. Overall, these results demonstrate that lyrics and tunes are processed at varying degrees of integration (and separation) through the consecutive processing levels allocated along the posterior-anterior axis of the left STS and the left PrCG.