音乐与语言的关系:来自句法、语义与音调节奏感知的神经活动证据

The Research on the Relationship of Music and Language on Three Levels: Syntax,Semantics and Perception of Pitch and Rhythm

音乐和语言加工神经基础的关系研究,近年来发展迅速,获得了越来越多的关注。大量研究主张音乐的句法加工和语言的句法加工具有较大程度的神经资源的共享。语言句法违例引发的ELAN与音乐句法违例引发的ERAN极为相似,其区别仅在于分布不同——ERAN就像是一个两半球对称的ELAN。而且ERAN的引发不受是否接受过音乐训练这一因素的影响,虽然音乐人被试引发的ERAN波幅更大。一些研究发现音乐语义加工的神经基础为N400和N500。前者可以由音乐和语言两种刺激引发,后者只能由音乐意义的加工引发。然而,音乐的音调感知和语言的音调感知是否共享了神经资源,目前尚无定论。

Since accumulated evidences have revealed that music and language do have some relationships, this field of study has attracted more and more interests. As scientists have addressed, music and language have many features in common. They are both struc- tured sequences which are arranged according to some rules, i. e. , syntax. Also, they can both express meanings and emotions, which can be called semantics. Thirdly, they both have elements like pitch and rhythm. And last, both music and language are unique for hu- mans and universal involved. To unveil the relationships between music and language, a lot of studies have been conducted to investigate the neural basis of them. Whether shared neural basis is involved in music and language has become the focus of these researches. Based on the common features of music and language, studies in this field include 3 levels, syntax, semantics and the perception of pitch and rhythm. On the level of syntax, shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis （SSIRH） was raised in 2003. It suggests that the brain re- gions for syntax processing can be divided into processing regions and representation regions, and music and language may share the processing regions. Comparative studies were done and most of them well supported SSIRH. In these studies, several distinctive ERP components were found such as ERAN and N500, which later became the standard indicator of music incongruousness and were applied to many comparative studies. However, SSIRH has not been proved yet. More evidences are needed to demonstrate the accurate regions and the processing mechanism in detail. On the level of semantics, researchers found that music, even single chord, could elicit a very similar N400 effect to that of lan- guage in an ERP experiment. These findings suggest that music is able to convey conceptual information like languages, and they proba- bly share some semantic processing resources. Since the processing mechanism and its location in brain remain unknown, further studies are required to illuminate the relationship between music and language in semantic level. On the level of pitch and rhythm perception, there are fewer studies available and the quality is not satisfying, compared to the studies conducted in the other two levels. Studies on rhythm perception in music and language are especially rare due to the lack of quantitative criteria with few ones implying that there is some connection between music and language. On the other hand, there are more studies on pitch perception. However, most of them put an emphasis on the correlation of pitch detect ability between music and language. The limited comparative studies on processing of pitch perception in music and language merely discovered the differences be- tween them. If music and language indeed have relationship in pitch perception, more comparative studies should be undertaken to clar- ify not only their different but also their common neural basis. All together, this review has tried to inform the readers with research on the relationship of music and language processing and help to establish a comprehensive map in this field.