RESEARCH ARTICLE
Melody and Language: An Examination of the Relationship Between Complementary Processes
Victoria L. Harms, Colleen Cochran, Lorin J. Elias*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2014Volume: 7
First Page: 1
Last Page: 8
Publisher ID: TOPSYJ-7-1
DOI: 10.2174/1874350101407010001
Article History:
Received Date: 05/11/2013Revision Received Date: 16/12/2013
Acceptance Date: 16/12/2013
Electronic publication date: 24/1/2014
Collection year: 2014
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
It is well accepted that the left and right hemispheres of the brain typically play separate and distinct roles in cognitive processing. Extensive research examining the lateralization of music and language processes has provided a clear and consistent demonstration of this division of processing across the cerebral hemispheres. However, in spite of this line of research examining population-level lateralization of these processes, little focus has been placed on examining the relationship between the two processes. Do these two processes share a common developmental origin that influences their pattern of lateralization, or do independent processes govern their lateralization? In this study we examined the relationship pattern in degree of lateralization between linguistic processing and melody recognition using dichotic-listening tasks. The expected right ear advantage was observed for the linguistic processing task. Additionally, the expected left ear advantage was not observed for the melody recognition task, precluding an informative assessment of complementarity between the two tasks. A positive correlation between the laterality scores on the two tasks suggests a shared processing network for linguistic and melodic processing.
