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Abstract:
Both music and language are sequences of discrete elements that are organised according
to “syntactic” rules. It has been proposed that syntactic processing in music and
language shares cognitive and neural resources. The overlap of cognitive resources is supported
by interactions and transfer effects between musical and linguistic syntax processing.
The neural location of the shared operations is, however, not yet fully clarified.
The present dissertation investigated whether the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the superior
temporal gyrus (STG) represent anatomical convergence zones of syntax processing in
music and language by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). The “Early Right Anterior
Negativity” (ERAN) and the “Early Left Anterior Negativity” (ELAN) that are elicited
by syntactic violations in chord progressions and sentences respectively were studied. Experiment
1 investigated whether lesions in brain regions that are essentially involved in the
processing of linguistic syntax lead to parallel deficits in the processing of musical syntax.
To this end, the ERAN was measured in two patient groups with lesions in the left IFG or
the left anterior STG and compared with data of healthy controls. In Experiment 2, ERPs
were recorded from subdural grid-electrodes, the electrocortical equivalents of the ERAN
and ELAN were identified, and their generators were localised and compared by means of
distributed source modelling.
The combined results indicate an overlap of musical and linguistic syntax processing within
the left IFG as well as the STG in both hemispheres, thus, identifying these structures as
anatomical correlate of shared syntactic processing components in music and language.
