Music and speech have long been thought to have common cognitive underpinnings, and recent research has shown that the music of expert composers tends to reflect the speech rhythms of their native language. However, simple music production is generally a more common undertaking, practiced by a much larger proportion of society than just expert composers. Moreover, experts have an elaborate cognitive and neural framework for music that enables them to perceive, organize, and produce music in ways that novices can not. This project will investigate the hypothesis that in the absence of this musical expertise, music novices have music-speech connections that are even more tightly bound to language than those shown in experts. In other words, the lack of a specific cognitive framework for music may force novices to rely more heavily on speech rhythms when they produce simple rhythmic tunes. In a series of experiments examining the perception and production of music rhythm by experts and novices, this project explores the proposition that music-speech connections in rhythm are stronger and far more widespread than have been previously shown.
The examination of a common rhythmic foundation for music and speech has received relatively little attention in the scientific literature, particularly when compared to pitch processing. In the pitch domain, for example, important discoveries have been made with respect to how the tonal qualities of music and speech are processed and the apparent specialization of the right and left auditory cortices in processing music and speech respectively. Our corresponding knowledge of commonalities in music and speech rhythm processing lags significantly behind. Nonetheless, there is emerging evidence of interplay between music and speech in both perception and production. Music has been shown to be an effective aid in language acquisition, and language learning has conversely been shown to enhance statistical learning of musical stimuli. However, the role that rhythm processing plays in the interplay between music and speech is still unclear. Thus, our ability to capitalize on these links in areas such as speech therapy or stroke rehabilitation is limited. This project will begin to provide a theoretical foundation for our knowledge of this linkage and will provide important insights into the common underpinnings of music and speech.
