Patel: Music, Language And The Brain Part Iii

Front 1

What is non-everyday emotion that music seems to elicit? What did a PET scan study show?

Back 1

Chills, PET scan showed that deep brain structures associated with reward and motivation system were correlated with chills.

Front 2

What were the procedure and results of the Balkwill and Thompson raga experiment?

Back 2

Western listeners listened to Indian ragas classified by the Indian system as expressing joy, sadness, anger, and peace. The listeners were able to identify the emotions of joy, sadness, and anger. Balkwill and Thompson argue for the existence of psychophysical cues to expression that can be perceived across cultures.

Front 3

What is the N400?

Back 3

A negative going ERP in response to a word, with a peak 400ms after the word onset. The peak gets bigger if the word seems like it doesn't fit in the sentence context.

Front 4

What did the experiment with N400 and music show?

Back 4

Listeners heard short musical excerpts, followed by a visually presented noun (wideness, caravan). Found an N400 effect for words following semantically mis-matched musical excerpts. Maybe indicates the ability for music to activate semantic concepts with some specificity.

Front 5

cross-modal acoustic cues for anger:

Back 5

fast rate, high voice intensity, high pitch level

Front 6

cross-modal acoustic cues for fear:

Back 6

fast rate, low voice intensity, high pitch level

Front 7

cross-modal acoustic cues for happiness:

Back 7

fast speech rate, medium-high intensity, high pitch level

Front 8

cross-model acoustic cues for sadness:

Back 8

slow speech rate, low voice intensity, low pitch level

Front 9

Evidence for adaptionist view of language

Back 9

1. Babbling
2. Anatomy of human vocal tract (more room, but can't swallow and breathe)
3. Vocal learning (learning to produce auditory signals based on auditory input)
4. Precocious learning of linguistic sound structure, robustness of acquisition mechanism (little exposure required)
5. Critical periods for language acquisition
6. Commonalities between spoken and signed language
7. Adding complexity to impoverished input
8. FOXP2 gene

Front 10

What is babbling?

Back 10

-around 7 months, babies begin to produce nonsense syllables
-likely to help learn relationship between oral movements and auditory outcomes
-evidence of adaptionist because its emergence is spontaneous, and not imitation of adult speech

Front 11

What are the hypotheses of why human musical ability might have been shaped by natural selection?

Back 11

1. Sexual selection (music allows complex courtship displays)
2. Music as a mechanism for mental and social development.
3. Role of music in creating social cohesion between members of a group.

Front 12

Evidence that music learning is not as robust as language

Back 12

1. wide variety of musical abilities in population
2. music cannot jump modalities, like sign language

Front 13

Which infant study is the most suggestive of innate pre-disposition to music in infants?

Back 13

Preference for infant-directed singing over infant-directed speech.

Front 14

What are some problems of specificity for infant studies of musical innateness?

Back 14

One must be sure that the infant musical skills really are innate and not due to previous experience, and they have to not be able to be explained via other traits such as language skills, or general auditory processing mechanisms.