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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 26, 2026

fMRI Mapping of Brain Activity Associated with the Vocal Production of Consonant and Dissonant Intervals

fMRI Mapping of Brain Activity Associated with the Vocal Production of Consonant and Dissonant Intervals

Published on: May 23, 2017

Structural integration in language and music: evidence for a shared system.

Evelina Fedorenko¹, Aniruddh Patel, Daniel Casasanto

¹Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. evelina@mit.edu

Memory & Cognition

|December 24, 2008

Summary

Language and music processing share cognitive resources, particularly for structural elements. Musical key violations significantly impacted language comprehension, suggesting overlapping neural pathways for structure.

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fMRI Mapping of Brain Activity Associated with the Vocal Production of Consonant and Dissonant Intervals

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Neuroscience
Psycholinguistics

Background:

Language and music are complex, structured communication systems.
Previous research suggests potential shared cognitive mechanisms for processing structure in both domains.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate whether language and music share cognitive resources for structural processing.
To examine the interaction between linguistic and musical complexity on comprehension.

Main Methods:

An experiment using sung sentences with varying linguistic complexity (subject- vs. object-extracted relative clauses).
Musical complexity was manipulated (in-key, out-of-key critical note, auditory anomaly).
Comprehension accuracy of sentence content was the primary measure.

Main Results:

An interaction between linguistic and musical complexity was observed.
The comprehension difference between sentence types was greater under out-of-key musical conditions.
This effect was not present in in-key or auditory anomaly conditions.

Conclusions:

The findings provide evidence for shared structural processing resources between language and music.
This suggests an overlap in the cognitive systems underlying the comprehension of complex structures in both domains.