Music & Language Studies

PATEL, Aniruddh D. and Isabelle Peretz. “Is Music Autonomous from Language? A Neuropsychological Appraisal.” In Perception and Cognition of Music, Irène Deliège and John Sloboda, eds., 191-215. Hove (UK): Psychology Press, 1997.

Presents a thoroughgoing overview of the question in its title. Explains many of the experiments and evidence, along with possible confounds to the resulting data. Suggests areas where continuing research is needed, in particular attempts to isolate neural specificity for speech versus non-speech domains. Covers the literature regarding memory for words and melody in song, and argues that a greater diversity of experimental data is required before firm conclusions can be drawn on the relation between musical and linguistic mental codes in song. In general, suggests that essential research is only now in the offing, and that many areas of inquiry remain to be examined.

The evidence reviewed in this chapter suggests that “music” and “language” are not independent mental faculties, but labels for complex sets of processes, some of which are shared and some different. Neuropsychology allows the empirical delineation of the boundaries between these domains, as well an exploration of their overlap.

…[N]europsychological evidence suggests that the processing of pitch contour employs some of the same neural resources in music and language, while the processing of tonality appears to draw on resources used uniquely by music.

Numerous other areas of convergence and divergence between music and language await more thorough investigation. (p. 208)

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