Abstract
Language and music are two human-unique capacities whose relationship remains debated. Some have argued for overlap in processing mechanisms, especially for structure processing. Such claims often concern the inferior frontal component of the language system located within ‘Broca’s area’. However, others have failed to find overlap. Using a robust individual-subject fMRI approach, we examined the responses of language brain regions to music stimuli, and probed the musical abilities of individuals with severe aphasia. Across four experiments, we obtained a clear answer: music perception does not engage the language system, and judgments about music structure are possible even in the presence of severe damage to the language network. In particular, the language regions’ responses to music are generally low, often below the fixation baseline, and never exceed responses elicited by non-music auditory conditions, like animal sounds. Further, the language regions are not sensitive to music structure: they show low responses to intact and structure-scrambled music, and to melodies with vs. without structural violations. Finally, in line with past patient investigations, individuals with aphasia who cannot judge sentence grammaticality perform well on melody well-formedness judgments. Thus the mechanisms that process structure in language do not appear to process music, including music syntax.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
↵† Co-senior authors
Clarified a few ideas in the introduction and discussion and added a few additional supplementary analyses.
