Biomedical subjects

Daniele Schön

Publications and source records attributed to Daniele Schön.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Musician children detect pitch violations in both music and language better than nonmusician children: behavioral and electrophysiological approaches.

The idea that extensive musical training can influence processing in cognitive domains other than music has received considerable attention from the educational system and the media. Here we analyzed behavioral data and recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from 8-year-old children to test the hypothesis that musical training facilitates pitch processing not only in music but also in language. We used a parametric manipulation of pitch so that the final notes or words of musical phrases or sentences were congruous, weakly incongruous, or strongly incongruous. Musician children outperformed nonmusician children in the detection of the weak incongruity in both music and language. Moreover, the greatest differences in the ERPs of musician and nonmusician children were also found for the weak incongruity: whereas for musician children, early negative components developed in music and late positive components in language, no such components were found for nonmusician children. Finally, comparison of these results with previous ones from adults suggests that some aspects of pitch processing are in effect earlier in music than in language. Thus, the present results reveal positive transfer effects between cognitive domains and shed light on the time course and neural basis of the development of prosodic and melodic processing.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2005

Global and local music perception in children with Williams syndrome.

Musical processing can be decomposed into the appreciation of global and local elements. This global/local dissociation was investigated with the processing of contour-violated and interval-violated melodies. Performance of a group of 16 children with Williams syndrome and a group of 16 control children were compared in a same-different task. Control participants were more accurate in detecting differences in the contour-violated than in the interval-violated condition while Williams syndrome individuals performed equally well in both conditions. This finding suggests that global precedence may occur at an early perceptual stage in normally developing children. In contrast, no such global precedence is observed in the Williams syndrome population. These data are discussed in the context of atypical cognitive profiles of individuals with Williams syndrome.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2005

Visually induced auditory expectancy in music reading: a behavioral and electrophysiological study.

The general aim of this experiment was to investigate the processes involved in reading musical notation and to study the relationship between written music and its auditory representation. It was of main interest to determine whether musicians are able to develop expectancies for specific tonal or atonal auditory events based on visual score alone. Can musicians expect an "atonal" event or will it always sound odd? Moreover, it was of interest to determine whether the modulations in amplitude of a late positive component (P600) described in previous studies are linked to a general mismatch detection process or to specific musical expectancies. Results showed clearly that musicians are able to expect tonal auditory endings based on visual information and are also able to do so for atonal endings, although to a smaller extent. Strong interactions seem to exist between visual and auditory musical codes and visual information seems to influence auditory processing as early as 100 msec. These results are directly relevant for the question of whether music reading is actually music perception.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Musical and linguistic processing in song perception.

One approach to comparing the neural bases of language and music is through the use of song, which is a unique and ecological combination of these two cognitive domains. In song, language and music are merged into one acoustic signal with two salient dimensions. By manipulating either the linguistic or musical dimensions (or both) of song and studying their relationships, it is possible to gain important information about the neural networks underlying language and music cognition. We will present a brief review followed by recent behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies concerned with the functional and structural relationships of music and language. These results, together with the previous studies in the field, help understanding whether the different levels of music and language processing are independent or interactive.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2004

The music of speech: music training facilitates pitch processing in both music and language.

The main aim of the present experiment was to determine whether extensive musical training facilitates pitch contour processing not only in music but also in language. We used a parametric manipulation of final notes' or words' fundamental frequency (F0), and we recorded behavioral and electrophysiological data to examine the precise time course of pitch processing. We compared professional musicians and nonmusicians. Results revealed that within both domains, musicians detected weak F0 manipulations better than nonmusicians. Moreover, F0 manipulations within both music and language elicited similar variations in brain electrical potentials, with overall shorter onset latency for musicians than for nonmusicians. Finally, the scalp distribution of an early negativity in the linguistic task varied with musical expertise, being largest over temporal sites bilaterally for musicians and largest centrally and over left temporal sites for nonmusicians. These results are taken as evidence that extensive musical training influences the perception of pitch contour in spoken language.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Singing: a selective deficit in the retrieval of musical intervals.

A case of dissociation between discrimination and retrieval of musical information in a patient with a lesion of the right hemisphere is described. This patient has lost the ability to correctly retrieve a musical interval when required to sing. This occurs in the presence of unimpaired interval discrimination and correct retrieval of temporal patterns and melodic contour (direction).

Auditory Perception↗

PubMed2003

Audiovisual interactions in music reading. A reaction times and event-related potentials study.

Auditory Perception↗

PubMed2003

Prosodic and melodic processing in adults and children. Behavioral and electrophysiologic approaches.

The results of a series of experiments aimed at directly comparing the prosodic level of processing in language with the melodic level of processing in music are reported. The first series of experiments was conducted on adults, musicians and nonmusicians, and the second one on 7- to 9-year-old musician and nonmusician children. However, as this last study is still in progress, only preliminary results will be presented. The theoretic framework within which these experiments are taking place is described. The first problem concerns the specificity of the perceptive and cognitive computations necessary to perceive and understand language. We argue that comparing language with music can provide interesting insights into this complex issue. The second problem is linked to the relationship between different types of learning. Does early musical training influence the way in which musicians process some aspects of language as prosody? These two problems are considered and the results of the experiments are described.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

An fMRI study of music sight-reading.

The brain areas involved in music reading were investigated using fMRI. In order to evaluate the specificity of these areas we compared reading music notation to reading verbal and number notations in a task that required professional pianists to play the notes (in musical and verbal notations) and the numbers displayed on a 5-key keyboard. Overall, the three tasks revealed a similar pattern of activated brain areas. However, direct contrasts between the music notation and the verbal or the numerical notation tasks also revealed specific major foci of activation in the right occipito-temporal junction, superior parietal lobule and the intraparietal sulcus. We interpret the right occipito-temporal difference as due to differences at the encoding level between notes, words and numbers. This area might be analogous to one described for words, called the visual word form area. The parietal activations are discussed in terms of visuo-motor transcoding pathways that differ for the three types of notations used. Finally, we present a model of music reading that can possibly explain our findings.

Auditory Perception↗

PubMed2002

Emotional prosody: sex differences in sensitivity to speech melody.

Emotional prosody is defined as the ability to express emotions through variations of different parameters of the human speech, such as pitch contour, intensity and duration. A recent study has discovered clear differences between men and women in the time course of emotional prosodic processing. There are several interpretations of these intriguing results that hold promise for future studies on language comprehension.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2002

Processing pitch and duration in music reading: a RT-ERP study.

The originality of this study is to examine the processing of pitch and duration in music reading, using both electrophysiological and behavioral methods. Specifically, it was of interest to determine whether pitch and duration in music reading are processed independently or jointly. A probe, comprising a key and time signature was presented, and participants were required to compute the tonic and/or the best fitting duration. A target note followed the probe and participants made a match/mismatch judgment on the dimension they were required to analyze (i.e. pitch or duration). We hypothesized that, if pitch and duration are processed independently results should show no interference of the irrelevant dimension on the relevant. Results showed that early differences emerged in the ERPs as a function of the task to be performed on the target in block 1. Moreover, RTs were shorter in the pitch than in the duration task and for congruous than incongruous targets. In the ERPs, this congruity effect was reflected by a negative component, to incongruous targets. Most importantly, the congruency of the target note on the irrelevant dimension did not have any effect on the ERPs, suggesting that pitch and duration are processed independently.

Adult↗