---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Tuesday, April 24, 2001, 8:24 AM +0100
From: Ian Pitchford <ian.pitchford@scientist.com>
To: evolutionary-psychology@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [evol-psych] Chords strike a grammatical note
> NATURE SCIENCE UPDATE
> brain: Chords strike a grammatical note
>
> TOM CLARKE
>
> The region of the brain that allows us understand whether a sentence makes
> sense may also help us tell the difference between a symphony and
> cacophony new research suggests1.
>
> The Broca's area - a brain region that processes the syntax, or word
> arrangement in a sentence - is activated when people hear a musical chord
> in the wrong place in a traditional progression of chords. So Burkhard
> Maess and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
> in Leipzig, Germany find.
>
> This suggests that our brains recognise the constituents of musical and
> linguistic sequences in the same way. "It looks like tonal syntax is
> closely analogous to the part of language we call grammar," says Carol
> Krumhansl, a psychologist at Cornell University in New York who studies
> music perception.
>
> Full text:
> http://www.nature.com/nsu/010426/010426-4.html
NATURE NEUROSCIENCE
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v4/n5/abs/nn0501_540.html
May 2001 Volume 4 Number 5 pp 540 - 545
Musical syntax is processed in Broca's area: an MEG study
Burkhard Maess, Stefan Koelsch, Thomas C. Gunter & Angela D. Friederici
Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, PO Box 500 355, D-04303,
Leipzig, Germany
Correspondence should be addressed to B Maess. e-mail: maess@cns.mpg.de
The present experiment was designed to localize the neural substrates that
process music-syntactic incongruities, using magnetoencephalography (MEG).
Electrically, such processing has been proposed to be indicated by early
right-anterior negativity (ERAN), which is elicited by harmonically
inappropriate chords occurring within a major-minor tonal context. In the
present experiment, such chords elicited an early effect, taken as the
magnetic
equivalent of the ERAN (termed mERAN). The source of mERAN activity was
localized in Broca's area and its right-hemisphere homologue, areas
involved in
syntactic analysis during auditory language comprehension. We find that
these
areas are also responsible for an analysis of incoming harmonic sequences,
indicating that these regions process syntactic information that is less
language-specific than previously believed.
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