Song, Speech, and Brain
This currently contains, all annotated entries from my 2000 bibliography. There are more entries that have yet to be annotated. I will be adding them as time goes. Annotations are on the linked posts for each citation.
The original version (in .pdf), which is organized chronologically, rather than by author, can be accessed here.
Introductory Remarks
This bibliography is an attempt to encapsulate the state of accumulated knowledge regarding brain processing of human vocal sounds, and to determine how and if such brain processing differs in the contexts of speech and song. The overarching motivation for this project is a desire to ascertain the aspects of perceptual and cognitive research which could directly impact the greater questions: What is music? How does music fit into the scheme of human behavioral interactions? How does the activity of music differ from its near cousin language? Both music and language exist primarily in the manipulation and organization of directed sounds, with an intent to express or communicate ideas or emotions. Yet much greater dedication of resources has historically gone to the study of language. Evolutionary theorists seem strongly biased towards a recognition that the phylogenesis of language in homo has been the major factor in the establishment of culture in our species. However, a similar recognition has not been forthcoming for music. The well-known linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has referred to music as “auditory cheesecake,” implying its significance is on a par with artifacts of gluttony and extravagance, not monuments of human achievement. In his 1997 book, “How the Mind Works,” he wrote:
As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world. Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once. [1]
If this were a reasonable tack, it might seem odd then to realize that modern humans, across cultures, all engage in music. Mothers the world over sing to their children as early as they speak to them. Just as every society has language, so too all cultures have music. Could it be that such a widespread and highly developed behavior as music is irrelevant to general theories on the evolution of our species? Some researchers are even now engaged in a review of the archeological record in an attempt to find evidence of prehistoric musical behaviors. How might the phylogenesis of music in our species relate to its ontogenesis in children and adults, and in what ways does it compare to the development of language? As Brown, Merker, and Wallin (2000) put it:
The language-centered view of humanity has to be expanded to include music, first, because the evolution of language is highly intertwined with the evolution of music, and, second, because music provides a specific and direct means of exploring the evolution of human social structure, group function, and cultural behavior. Music making is the quintessential human cultural activity, and music is an ubiquitous element in all cultures large and small. [2]
By examining the literature of brain processing of human vocal sounds, we can begin to formulate and reformulate theories about how our minds attend and engage the specific auditory environment which is universal to all peoples[3]—perhaps even to our evolutionary ancestors as well. Are music and language truly separable? And if so, in what ways, and which not? In singing, we see an unmistakable common ground, or so it seems. Undeniably, song is a blending together of linguistic and musical elements into a unified whole. Yet the history of neurological disorders reports numerous cases of dissociation of language and music. Patients have been reported to lose the ability to speak, yet retain the capacity to sing. There is a successful speech therapy program for aphasics called Melodic Intonation Therapy, which is specifically based on the premise that individuals who have lost the ability to speak can exploit different neurological pathways for singing, in order to regain speech. In what ways is singing a linguistic activity and how is speaking a musical one? How can we distinguish them? It is in an attempt to better understand the cognitive and perceptual divergences and convergences between these two domains of human vocal and auditory behavior that this bibliography is concerned.
[1] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 528.
[2] Steven Brown, Björn Merker, and Nils L. Wallin , “An Introduction to Evolutionary Musicology,” in The Origins of Music, ed. Wallin, Merker, and Brown (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), 3.
[3] Clearly there are exceptions to this, most obviously inasmuch as there is congenital deafness throughout the world. However, the arguments in this paper will assume as default neurologically intact, hearing humans.
Bibliography
ALBERT, M.L., R.W. Sparks, and N.A. Helm. “Melodic Intonation Therapy for Aphasia.” Archives for Neurology 29 (1973): 130-131.
BARTHOLOMEUS, Bonnie. “Effects of Task Requirements on Ear Superiority for Sung Speech.” Cortex 10/3 (1974): 215-223.
BELIN, Pascal, et al. 2000. “Voice-selective areas in human auditory cortex.” Nature 43 (20 January 2000): 309-312.
BELL, William L., Diana L. Davis, Anna Morgan-Fisher, and Elliott D. Ross. “Acquired Aprosodia in Children.” Journal of Child Neurology 5 (Jan 1990): 19-26.
BLUMSTEIN, Sheila, and William E. Cooper. “Hemispheric Processing of Intonation Contours.” Cortex 10/2 (1974): 146-158.
BOLLER, François and Eugene Green. “Comprehension in Severe Aphasics.” Cortex 8/4 (1972): 382-394.
BRIGHT, William. “Language and Music: Areas for Cooperation.” Ethnomusicology 7/11 (1963): 26-32.
BUCHANAN, Tony W. Kai Lutz, Shahram Mirzazade, Karsten Specth, N. Jon Shah, Karl Zilles, and Lutz Jäncke. “Recognition of Emotional Prosody and Verbal Components of Spoken Language: An fMRI study.” Cognitive Brain Research 9 (2000): 227-38.
CROWDER, Robert G. “Representation of Speech Sounds in Precategorical Acoustic Storage.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 98/1 (1973): 14-24.
DOHERTY, Colin P., M Fitzsimons, B. Asenbauer, and H. Staunton. “Discrimination of Prosody and Music by Normal Children.” European Journal of Neurology 6 (1999): 221-6.
EDMONDSON, Jerold A., Jin-Lieh Chan, G. Burton Seibert, and Elliott D. Ross. “The Effect of Right-Brain Damage on Acoustical Measures of Affective Prosody in Taiwanese Patients.” Journal of Phonetics 15 (1987): 219-33.
FAGLIONI, P., H. Spinnler, and L. A. Vignolo. “Contrasting Behavior of Right and Left Hemisphere-Damaged Patients on a Discriminative and a Semantic Task of Auditory Recognition.” Cortex 5/4 (1969): 366-89.
FERNALD, Anne. “Intonation and Communicative Intent in Mothers’ Speech to Infants: Is the Melody the Message?” Child Development 60 (1989): 1497-1510.
GORDON, H.W. and J.E. Bogen. “Hemispheric Lateralization of Singing after Intracarotic Sodium Amylobarbitone.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 37 (1974): 727-38.
GORELICK, Philip B. and Elliott D. Ross. “The Aprosodias: Further Functional-Anatomical Evidence for the Organisation of Affective Language in the Right Hemisphere.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 50 (1987): 553-60.
HALPERIN, Y, I. Nachshon, and A. Carmon. “Shift of Ear Superiority in Dichotic Listening to Temporally Patterned Nonverbal Stimuli.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 53/1 (1973): 46-50.
HEILMAN, K. M., R. Scholes, and R. T. Watson. “Auditory Affective Agnosia: Disturbed Comprehension of Affective Speech.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 38 (1975): 60-72.
KELLEY, Darcy B. “A Motor Theory of Song Perception.” Trends in Neurosciences 9/4 (Apr 1986): 149-150.
KIMURA, Doreen. “Functional Asymmetry of the Brain in Dichotic Listening.” Cortex 3 (1967): 163-178.
KUROWSKI, Kathleen M., Sheila E. Blumstein, and Michael Alexander. “The Foreign Accent Syndrome.” Brain and Language 54 (1996): 1-25.
LIBERMAN, Alvin M., and Ignatius G. Mattingly. “The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised.” Cognition 21 (1985): 1-36.
LIST, George. “The Boundaries of Speech and Song.” Ethnomusicology 7/1 (1963): 1-17.
MEHLER, Jacques, Peter Jusczyk, Ghislaine Lambertz, Nilofar Halsted, Josiane Bertoncini, and Claudine Amiel-Tison. “A Precursor of Language Acquisition in Young Infants.” Cognition 29 (1988): 143-78.
MEREWETHER, Frank C. and Murray Alpert. “The Components and Neuroanatomic Bases of Prosody.” Journal of Communication Disorders 23/4-5 (Aug-Oct 1990): 325-336.
MILNER, Brenda. “Laterality Effects in Audition.” In Interhemispheric Relations and Cerebral Dominance, ed. V. B. Mountcastle, 177-195. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962.
MONRAD-KROHN, G. H. “Dysprosody or Altered ‘Melody of Language’.” Brain 70 (1947): 405-15.
– “The Third Element of Speech: Prosody and Its Disorders.” In Problems of Dynamic Neurology, ed. L. Halpern, 101-18. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1963.
NETTL, Bruno. “Some Linguistic Approaches to Musical Analysis.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 10 (1958): 37-41.
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.
RIECKER, Axel, et al. “Opposite Hemispheric Lateralization Effects During Speaking and Singing at Motor Cortex, Insula and Cerebellum.” NeuroReport 11/9 (2000):1997-2000.
ROBINSON, George M. and Deborah Jo Solomon. “Rhythm is Processed by the Speech Hemisphere?” Journal of Experimental Psychology 102/3 (1974): 508-11.
ROSS, Elliott D. “The Aprosodias: Functional-Anatomic Organization of the Affective Components of Language in the Right Hemisphere.” Archives of Neurology 38 (Sep 1981): 561-569.
ROSS, Elliott D. “Right Hemisphere’s Role in Language, Affective Behavior and Emotion.” Trends in Neurosciences 7/9 (Sep 1984): 342-6.
ROSS, Elliott D., Britt Anderson, and Anna Morgan-Fisher. “Crossed Aprosodia in Strongly Dextral Patients.” Archives of Neurology 46 (Feb 1989): 206-9.
ROSS, Elliott D., Jerold A. Edmondson, and G. Burton Seibert. “The Effect of Affect of Various Acoustic Measures of Prosody in Tone and Non-Tone Languages: A Comparison Based on Computer Analysis of Voice.” Journal of Phonetics 14 (1986): 283-302.
ROSS, Elliott D., Jerold A. Edmondson, G. Burton Seibert, and Richard W. Homan. “Acoustic Analysis of Affective Prosody during Right-Sided Wada Test: A Within-Subjects Verification of the Right Hemisphere’s Role in Language.” Brain and Language 33 (1988): 128-45.
ROSS, Elliott D., and Marek-Marsel Mesulam. “Dominant Language Functions of the Right Hemisphere? Prosody and Emotional Gesturing.” Archives of Neurology 36 (Mar 1979): 144-48.
SERAFINE, Mary Louise, Robert G. Crowder, and Bruno H. Repp. “Integration of Melody and Text in Memory for Songs.” Cognition 16 (1984): 285-303.
SERAFINE, Mary Louise, Janet Davidson, Robert G. Crowder, and Bruno Repp. “On the Nature of Melody-Text Integration in Memory for Songs.” Journal of Memory and Language 25 (1986): 123-35.
SHANKWEILER, Donald, and Michael Studdert-Kennedy. “A Continuum of Lateralization for Speech Perception?” Brain and Language 2 (1975): 212-225.
SHIPLEY-BROWN, Frances, William O. Dingwall, Charles I. Berlin, Grace Yeni-Komshian, and Sandra Gordon-Salant. “Hemispheric Processing of Affective and Linguistic Intonation Contours in Normal Subjects.” Brain and Language 33 (1988): 16-26.
STUDDERT-KENNEDY, Michael and Donald Shankweiler. “Hemispheric Specialization for Speech Perception.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 48/2-2 (1970): 579-94.
WOOD, Charles C., William R. Goff, and Ruth S. Day. “Auditory Evoked Potentials during Speech Perception.” Science, New Series, 173/4003 (Sep 24, 1971): 1248-1251.
YAMADORI, A., Y. Osumi, S. Masuhara, and M. Okubo. “Preservation of Singing in Broca’s Aphasia.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 40 (1977): 221-24.
ZATORRE, Robert J. “Musical Perception and Cerebral Function: A Critical Review.” Music Perception 2/2 (1984): 196-221.
ZURIF, Edgar B. “Auditory Lateralization: Prosodic and Syntactic Factors.” Brain and Language 1 (1974): 391-404.
