Music & Language Studies

“Foreign Accent Syndrome: In the ear of the beholder?” Aphasiology V. 20, Nos. 9-11, Sep/Oct/Nov 2006, pp. 951-962, Cinzia Di Dio, Joerg Schulz, and Jennifer M. Gurd.

Abstract:

Background: The identification of accent type in patients with acquired accent change following brain damage (Foreign Accent Syndrome; FAS), may vary depending on the judge.

Aims: This experiment tests the accent identification abilities of naïve judges listening to speech samples from FAS patients versus healthy controls.

Method & Procedures: A total of 52 naive judges listened to speech samples from speakers of British English, which were presented over audio CD. They were asked to identify the accent type, but were blind as to the identity of the participants vis‐à‐vis FAS versus control, and foreign versus native UK. Accuracy, variability, and confidence ratings were assessed as a function of participant and of accent type.

Outcomes & Results: The naïve judges displayed greater accuracy, consistency, and confidence in typing the control versus the FAS accents. There was a positive familiarity effect for the control, but not the FAS accents.

Conclusions: The data provide preliminary support for the view that FAS is not exclusively “in the ear of the beholder”.

Rhythm appears to be a fundamental capacity of humans. Rhythm plays a role in the prenatal environment and the early socialization of infants (Bertoncini, et al., 1995; Fassbender, 1996; Hargreaves, 1986; Papoušek, 1996). It has been implicated in the coordination of motor activity and locomotion (Iverson & Thelen, 1999). Rhythmic processing is a late deteriorating function in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s (Beatty, et al., 1999). Rhythm appears to be a basic element in the construction of more complex human behaviors and interactions, such as music and language (Iverson & Thelen, 1999; Patel, et al., 1998), and has been implicated in aspects of memory (Brower, 1993; Payne & Holzman, 1986; Patel, et al., 1998).

A greater understanding of rhythm processing will therefore benefit from joint explorations across these domains of human behavior, in particular in music and language because of their universal presence across cultures and throughout the lifespan. Both music and speech share the same acoustic medium. Both are processed by the same perceptual apparatus. I find it reasonable to assume that the cognitive heuristics used for making sense of music and speech are at least similar, because we lack sufficient evidence to suggest that humans have evolved two entirely different mental modules for music and for language. To the contrary, there is great evidence to suggest that the distinction between music and speech is only achieved at higher levels of processing (Patel, et al., 1998).

There are many aspects of temporal processing that are relevant for this examination, and which necessarily impact an understanding of the subject. Unfortunately, well-formed and agreed upon definitions are in short supply. Paul Fraisse (1982), for instance, has written: “The task of those who study rhythm is a difficult one, because a precise, generally accepted definition of rhythm does not exist.” (149) What’s more, the definitions that occasionally arise lack consistency in what they describe. In an attempt to clarify and tease apart the various aspects of temporal organization, I provide my own definitions of certain aspects, which I trust are no less nor more arbitrary than most. I make no attempt however to be exhaustive in these definitions, in part because there appear to be many equally valid ways to divide up the temporal domain. I merely seek a first approximation of terms to address those aspects which will most facilitate questions dealing jointly with music and speech. Read the rest of this entry »

Denoting the Voice: Text and Context in Music and Language

Jonathan G. Secora Pearl
Fellowship proposal, submitted to the NEH

The Problem

Charles Darwin was wrong, at least about music. In “The Descent of Man,” he wrote: “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” (Darwin, C. 2004 [1879]: 636) One might have expected more, knowing his wife Emma was a fine pianist, who in her youth had studied in Paris with Frédéric Chopin. Generations of scholars, from outside the field of music, have compared it to other human behaviors, and found it lacking, a mere artifice, insubstantial, ornamental, irrelevant. Some have dismissed it as a byproduct of something ostentibly more useful to the species, like language. (Pinker, S. 1997: 528) To hold that music is useless, but that language is not, one must understand how they differ. It is a simple thing to claim they are not alike, but far harder in practice to define the ways. Music and language remain twin aspects of civilization, found in all known human cultures, across time and place, embracing us from our earliest days until the ends of our lives. Speaking and singing are found everywhere and everywhen. Wherein lies the distinction?

The greatest difficulty in answering this foundational question is that we are often deceived by written forms of music and language into believing our object dwells within them, rather than in the sounds that inspire them. On the page, they appear far more distinct than they do in sound.Text without context is a world without air; yet context alone remains the unanalyzable chaos of everyday experience. The trick is to find the balance between too much detail, and too little. Most important is a self-reflective understanding of the specifics regarding what each system captures and what it leaves out. Standard Western music notation gives preference to pitch classes and length, dealing more with intention than with execution. Written language may highlight phonetic details and word order at the expense of intonation and timing. Comparing music and language in these forms is speaking at cross-purposes. Read the rest of this entry »

Murry, Thomas, Jeannette Hoit-Dalgaard, and Vincent L. Gracco. “Infant Vocalization: A Longitudinal Study of Acoustic and Temporal Parameters,” Folia Phoniatrica 35: 245-253 (1983).

The present investigation is a longitudinal study of cry and noncry vocalizations obtained from 1 infant at biweekly intervals from 2 to 12 weeks of life. (245)

The authors sought:

to determine if longitudinal trends existed in cry and nondistress vocalizations. (245)

Recordings were made about every two weeks for the first three months of life. A distinction was drawn between distress and non-distress vocalizations, principally on the basis of known context. The authors note that non-distress vocalizations first emerge during the eighth week of life. The cry samples were analyzed acoustically

to obtain F0, the duration of the vocalic segments, the amount of periodicity, aperiodicity and silence in the sample, and classification of melody contours. (246)

The researchers plotted a stylization of the intonation contours (termed melodygrams) abstracted from 0.1 s segment readings of periodic signals. Segments in excess of 0.4 s were classified from these stylizations as one of 7 melody types:

rising (R), falling (F), rising-falling (RF), falling-rising (FR), flat (FL), rising-falling-rising (RFR), or falling-rising-falling (FRF). (246)

They observe:

The falling contours are assumed to represent the natural physiologic state; that is, the fall in F0 results from a decrease in subglottic air pressure over the expiratory cycle. The rising or flat terminations, however, reflect phonatory modification of the airstream; that is, the natural falling contour is altered. This finding suggests that cry and nondistress vocalizations may be separated on the basis of final termination markers. (251)

As a result of these investigations, they conclude:

Examination of the similarities among the vocalization data revealed evidence of two developmental trends. A general increase in the main duration of vocalic segments was noted in all three phonatory conditions. Secondly, the cry data, especially the discomfort cry, showed a higher proportion of periodic phonation relative to silence as the infant matured. These trends appear to reflect increased respiratory and phonatory control which accompanies the normal developmental process. (251)

Commentary on Belin, et al. (2000) has been added to the Song, Speech, and Brain bibliography.

Belin, Pascal, et al. 2000. “Voice-selective areas in human auditory cortex.” Nature 43 (20 January 2000): 309-312.

This team of researchers reports on what they term voice selective areas of the brain, which selectively respond to the sounds of a human voice regardless of the sorts of behavior in which it is involved. This flies in the face of previous work on auditory perception that presupposed a distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic sounds. Much of the work on dichotic listening from the 1960s for instance (and even more so, later articles that uncritically cited this earlier work) presupposed as uncontentious the a priori distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic inputs. What is implied by this report is that a more valid distinction lies between vocal and non-vocal sounds.

They write:

Here we show, using functional magnetic resonance imaging in human volunteers, that voice-selective regions can be found bilaterally along the upper bank of the superior temporal sulcus (STS). These regions showed greater neuronal activity when subjects listened passively to vocal sounds, whether speech or non-speech, than to non-vocal environmental sounds. (309)

The authors conducted three experiments. The first consisted in passive listening by 8 right-handed subjects to two categories of stimuli:

1) vocal sounds produced by several speakers of different gender and age, either speech (for example, isolated words, connected speech in several languages) or non-speech (such as laughs, sighs and coughs); and (2) energy-matched, non-vocal sounds (for example, natural sounds, animal cries, mechanical sounds) from a variety of environmental sources. (309)

Experiment 2 further supported a supposition that

the voice-sensitive response was not entirely due to the presence of speech in the vocal stimuli. (310)

and further that

frequency structure plays a more prominent role in voice-sensitive activation than does amplitude envelope. (310)

The third experiment was conducted with a different group of subjects. In this case, a vocal/non-vocal decision task and a speaker’s gender-identification tasks were added, post-scanning.

They explain:

In all three experiments, peaks of voice selectivity could be found in most subjects along the upper bank of the STS, a deep, long sulcus (>8 cm) running along the whole temporal lobe that is also found in many non-human primates. (310)

They observe that

voice-selective regions were found in the STS on both sides, but voice selectivity was stronger in the right hemisphere in the first two experiments… However, the same pattern was not found in expt 3, suggesting that the neural substrate of voice perception might be less clearly lateralized than in the case of speech perception. (310-311)

They conclude:

these experiments provide strong evidence that the human brain contains regions that are not only sensitive to, but also strongly selective to, human voices. (311)

In outlining the significance of these findings, among other points, they suggest that

it could lead to new comparisons between species, by suggesting that areas sensitive to species-typical vocalizations could be found in the homologous regions in other primates. Indeed, language is probably unique to humans, and its possible evolutionary precursors are hard to define and study in other animals. In contrast, we share the ability to reliably extract affective- and identity-related cues from the species-specific vocalizations with many other species, at least of primates. (311)

Indeed, it would be fascinating to attempt such studies with non-human subjects (though the logistics of scanning an ape might be more than can be handled at the moment). I would suggest also that similar experiments should be conducted on deaf subjects, using passive viewing of sign and gestures. In the place of environmental sounds, environmental motions could be used. The point would be to ascertain 1) whether these voice-selective areas are indeed exclusively a part of auditory processing, or whether (as in the case of congenital deafness in particular) they might be shown to be part of a general human pattern-recognition process, coopted by the mind, in the absence of auditory input; and 2) even if these regions are sustained as exclusively (or primarily) part of our sound-processing mechanism, is it possible to uncover homologous regions in the brain that are selective, rather than to speech or vocal sounds, to (in the words of Petitto 2000) “aspects of the patterning of language …its temporal and distributional regularities”?

Plantinga, Judy & Laurel J. Trainor. “Memory for melody: infants use a relative pitch code,” Cognition 98 (2005): 1-11.

Plantinga & Trainor begin by noting that while most other animals rely upon absolute pitch data, humans tend to prefer relative pitch. While absolute pitch has often been considered a coveted ability, the authors observe that

focusing on absolute pitch information may be a musical hindrance. (2)

This matter goes beyond music however, as relative pitch reflects a more general ability of humans to approximate, to identify similarities from a mass of real-world instances, in ways that likely go beyond the abilities of other animals. As they put it:

the ability to encode relative pitch and perceive melodic invariance across pitch transposition is a more sophisticated ability than remembering absolute pitch. (2)

They point out the tonotopic organization of pitch physiologically, and indicate that relative pitch processing is therefore a cognitive task, following initial processing of the acoustic information. They cite Heaton, Hermelin, & Pring (1998) and Brown et al., (2003) in discussing correlations between absolute pitch processing and autism

suggesting that absolute pitch processing is associated with a particular cognitive style. (3)

They indicate the suggestion by others

that early in life all infants rely mainly on absolute pitch, but that with increasing age and experience most shift to processing relative pitch (Sergeant & Roche, 197; Takeuchi & Hulse, 1993). (3)

Yet, they challenge this notion, stating:

there are little data to suggest a transition from absolute to relative pitch processing. (3)

The remainder of the article sets out details of two experiments conducted to test this, concluding:

The results of this study suggest that by 6 months of age infants, like adults, store melodic information primarily according to a relative and not an absolute pitch code in long-term memory. … The possibility that infants also remember absolute pitch of a familiar melody cannot be ruled out, but the present results argue against robust absolute pitch memory. (8)

Yet, they concede:

It is still possible that there is a developmental shift from predominantly absolute pitch processing to predominantly relative pitch processing that takes place before 6 months of age. (9)

References

Brown, W. A., et al. (2003). “Autism-related language, personality, and cognition in people with absolute pitch: Results of a preliminary study,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 33, 163-167.

Heaton, P., B. Hermelin, and L. Pring. (1998). “Autism and pitch processing: A precursor for savant musical ability,” Music Perception 15, 291-205.

Sergeant, D. and S. Roche. (1973). “Perceptual shifts in the auditory information processing of young children,” Perception of Music 1, 39-48.

Takeuchi, A. H. and S. H. Hulse. (1993). “Absolute pitch,” Psychological Bulletin 113, 345-361.

Petitto, Laura Ann. “On the biological foundations of human language,” in Emmorey et al, Eds., The Signs of Language Revisited. [CITY?]: Lawrence Erlbaum. 2000, 449-473.

The author, who as an undergraduate at Columbia University had been part of an ape-language experiment with the West African chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky, sets down the task:

Our question concerned whether aspects of human language were species specific, or whether human language was wholly learnable from environmental input. (450)

She adds:

All chimpanzees fail to master key aspects of human language structure, even when you give them a way to bypass their inability to speak—for example, by exposing them to other types of linguistic input such as natural signed languages. This fact raised the hypothesis to me that humans possessed something at birth in addition to the mechanisms for producing and perceiving speech sounds that aided them in acquiring natural language.

In this article, she seeks in particular to challenge the notion that

evolution has rendered the human brain neurologically “hardwired” for speech (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985, 1989; Lieberman, 1984). (452)

She contends that

If, as has been argued, very early human language acquisition is under the exclusive control of the maturation of the mechanisms for speech production and speech perception (Locke, 1983; Van der Stelt & Koopmans-van Bienum, 1986), then spoken and signed languages should be acquired in very different ways. (452)

She proceeds to outline a great many experiments involving deaf children of deaf and hearing parents, hearing children of deaf parents, English, French, ASL (American Sign Language), LSQ (Langue des Signes Québécoise).

In describing one part of the study, involving hearing children exposed only to sign languages, she notes the suprising result that

These babies achieve all linguistic milestones on a normal maturational time table. If early human language acquisition were wholly determined neurologically by the mechanisms for speech production and reception, then these hearing babies raised without systematic spoken language stimulation should show atypical patterns of language acquisition. Instead, all of these groups of hearing babies produced manual babbling, first signs, first two-signs, and other milestones, at the same time as is seen in all other children, be they hearing acquiring speech or Deaf acquiring sign. (456)

She asks:

Might the occurrence and developmental timing of this behavior in all infants suggest something about the “ready-state” nature of the human body to express language from multiple pathways? (462)

Then proceeds to outline her theory that

there is a biological “equipotentiality” of the spoken and signed modalities to receive and produce natural language. (462)

At the end of this thoroughly enjoyable, greatly detailed, and forcefully argued piece, she concludes:

the present findings have led me to propose a new way to construe human language ontogeny. Rather than being exclusively hard-wired for speech or sound, the young of our species are initially hardwired to detect aspects of the patterning of language. I suggested here that this initial sensitivity is to aspects of its temporal and distributional regularities initially corresponding to the syllabic and prosodic levels of natural language organization. (470)

References

LIBERMAN, Alvin M., and Ignatius G. Mattingly. (1985) “The Motor Theory of Speech Perception Revised.” Cognition 21 (1985): 1-36.

–. (1989) “A specialization for speech perception.” Science 243 (4890): 489-494.

Lieberman, P. (1984) The biology and evolution of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Locke, J. L. (1983). Phonological acquisition and change. New York: Academic Press.

Van der Stelt, J. M. & Koomans-van Bienum, F. J. (1986). “The onset of babbling related to gross motor development.” In Lindblom & Zetterstrom (Eds.), Precursors of early speech. New York: Stockton Press, 163-173.

Saffran, Jenny R., Richard N. Aslin & Elissa L. Newport. “Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants,” Science 274 (13 December 1996).

A short but sophisticated and critical look at well-established assumptions regarding first language acquisition. In particular, the authors sought to challenge the notion of the poverty of the stimulus, as articulated by Noam Chomsky and others. [1] They summarized the standard view:

few theorists have entertained the hypothesis that learning plays a primary role in the acquisition of more complicated aspects of language, favoring instead experience-independent mechanisms. Young humans are generally viewed as poor learners, suggesting that innate factors are primarily responsible for the acquisition of language. (1926)

They went on:

In particular, we ask whether infants are in fact better learners than has previously been assumed, thus potentially reducing the extent to which experience-independent structures must be posited.(1927)

The focus of this study was the acquisition of word boundaries from speech stimuli. Moving from the established principle that “measurable statistical regularities” can serve as cues to word boundaries, [2] they tested whether 8-month old infants were able to abstract such cues from a brief exposure to artificial wordlike stimuli.

They observed:

Our results raise the intriguing possibility that infants possess experience-dependent mechanisms that may be powerful enough to support not only word segmentation but also the acquisition of other aspects of language.

and concluded:

the massive amount of experience gathered by infants during the first postnatal year may play a far greater role in development than has previously been recognized.

[1] Cited by the authors in this regard: Chomsky, N. (1965), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Crain, S. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (1991), 597.

[2] Cited by the authors: Harris, Z. (1955), Language 31, 190; Hayes, J. and H. Clark (1970), in Cognition and the Development of Language, J. Hayes (ed.); Brent, M. and T. Cartwright (1996), Cognition 61, 93.

I will be creating a bibliography on the phylogenetic development of skills and capacities both within the hominid line and comparatively within other species.

Nathani, Suneeti, D. Kimbrough Oller, and Alan B. Cobo-Lewis. “Final Syllable Lengthening (FSL) in infant vocalizations,” Journal of Child Language 30 (2003): 3-25.

Lee, Christopher S. and Neil P. McMangus Todd. “Towards an auditory account of speech rhythm: application of a model of the auditory ‘primal sketch’ to two multi-language corpora, Cognition 93 (2004): 225-254.