Linguistic and musical syntactic processing in Aphasia: is there a relationship?L. Robert Slevc & Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah

University of Maryland, College Park

Language and Music •!Both rely on hierarchical structure

• Rule-based combinations of discrete elements yield complex structures.

•!Linguistic and musical syntax may rely on shared cognitive/neural processes: •!Manipulations of linguistic and musical syntax lead to behavioral and neural interactive effects (e.g., Slevc et al., 2009).

•!Musical syntactic processing recruits "language areas" of the brain (especially LIFG; e.g., Tillmann et al., 2006).

• But other findings suggest no relationship: •!evidence for non-overlapping neural responses to language and music (e.g., Rogalsky et al., 2011).

•!dissociations between aphasia and amusia (e.g., Luria et al., 1965).

•!The little work investigating musical syntactic processing in agrammatic aphasia has yielded equivocal results (Patel et al., 2008).

Participants •!Twelve persons with Aphasia (PWA) and twelve age-matched control participants (mean age = 55.3)

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Conclusions •!PWA impaired on off-line linguistic acceptability judgments, but not impaired on an "on-line" linguistic task. PWA did as well as controls on both off-line and on-line musical syntactic tasks. •!Little relationship between domains, lending no support to a strong neuroanatomical association between linguistic and musical syntax following left hemisphere damage.

"off-line" tasks •!Linguistic acceptability judgments!of sentences with and without morphosyntactic violations (sentence stimuli from Faroqi-Shah & Dickey, 2009).

•!Musical acceptability judgments!of chord progressions with and without a chord from a foreign musical key (chord sequences from Patel et al., 1998).

key of C major

"on-line" tasks •!Word monitoring in grammatical or ungrammatical contexts (morphological, thematic, and word-class violations).

\ •!Harmonic priming: classify timbre of final chord, either when harmonically expected (tonic) or less expected (subdominant).

D major♭

Results: "off-line" acceptability judgment tasksMusic judgmentsLanguage judgments

Results: "on-line" tasksHarmonic primingWord monitoring

* from the Western Aphasia Battery (Kertesz, 1982)

(Lerdahl, 2001)

(Thanks to Teresa Longo, Rebecca McDaniels, Ashley Nimmo, Brooke Okada, Anjana Rao, Monica Sampson, Sadhvi Saxena, Alison Shell, & the UMD BSOS Dean's Research Initiative)contact: slevc@umd.edu or yfshah@umd.edu

Relationship between tasks

Relationship between tasks

= p

rofe

ssio

nal m

usic

ian

= p

rofe

ssio

nal m

usic

ian

p < .05 p < .05 p < .05 p = .06

p < .05

(also a significant main effect of group for both tasks)

harpsichord timbretrumpet or choir timbre

identical local context

The waitress will bring the food…

FOOD ! target word

The waitress will bringing the food…

Last year, my sister lives in Boston.

•!This study measured both "off-line" and "on-line" sensitivity to linguistic and musical syntax in persons with left hemisphere damage.

p < .05 p < .05 p < .05 p < .05 (note: music effect 'flipped' -- plotted as I-IV minus!V-I)

References Faroqi-Shah, Y. & Dickey, M.W. (2009). On-line processing of tense and temporality in agrammatic aphasia. Brain & Language, 108, 97-111. Luria, A.R., Tsvetkova, L.S., & Futer, D.S. (1965). Aphasia in a composer. Journal of the Neurological Sciences, 2, 288-292. Patel, A.D., Gibson, E., Ratner, J., Besson, M., Holcomb, P.J. (1998). Processing syntactic relations in language and music: An event-related potential study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10, 717-733. Patel, A.D., Iversen, J.R., Wassenaar, M., Hagoort, P. (2008). Musical syntactic processing in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Aphasiology, 22, 776-789. Rogalsky, C., Rong, F., Saberi, K., Hickok, G. (2011). Functional anatomy of language and music perception: Temporal and structural factors investigated using fMRI. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 3843-3852. Slevc, L.R., Rosenberg, J.C., & Patel, A.D. (2009). Making psycholinguistics musical: Self-paced reading time evidence for shared processing of linguistic and musical syntax. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 16, 374-381. Tillmann, B., Koelsch, S., Escoffier, N., Bigand, E., Lalitte, P., Friederici, A.D., von Cramon, D.Y. (2006). Cognitive priming in sung and instrumental music: Activation of inferior frontal cortex. NeuroImage, 31, 1771-1782.

Age Aphasia

Quotient* Aphasia Profile

Musical

(self) Classification

aph1 54 57.7 Broca’s music-loving non-musician

aph2 63 33.6 Broca’s professional musician

aph5 67 30.3 Broca’s music-loving non-musician

aph6 55 100 Mild Anomic professional musician

aph7 54 97 Anomic non-musician

aph8 40 92.8 Anomic music-loving non-musician

aph9 74 63.4 Broca’s music-loving non-musician

aph11 46 85.1 Anomic amateur musician

aph14 57 75.3 Conduction non-musician

aph15 54 50.7 Wernicke’s non-musician

aph17 53 74.1 Anomic non-musician

aph18 48 100 Mild Anomic music-loving non-musician

I I6 IV6/4 V7 I V6 I IV

I V I IV I6 ii6/5 V I