title: The role of musical aptitude and language skills in preattentive duration processing in school-aged children.
abstract: We examined 10-12-year old elementary school children's ability to preattentively process sound durations in music and speech stimuli. In total, 40 children had either advanced foreign language production skills and higher musical aptitude or less advanced results in both musicality and linguistic tests. Event-related potential (ERP) recordings of the mismatch negativity (MMN) show that the duration changes in musical sounds are more prominently and accurately processed than changes in speech sounds. Moreover, children with advanced pronunciation and musicality skills displayed enhanced MMNs to duration changes in both speech and musical sounds. Thus, our study provides further evidence for the claim that musical aptitude and linguistic skills are interconnected and the musical features of the stimuli could have a preponderant role in preattentive duration processing.
authors.affiliation: Department of English, University of Turku, Finland; Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Turku, Finland. riia.milovanov@utu.fi
authors.forename: Riia
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Milovanov
authors.forename: Minna
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Huotilainen
authors.forename: Paulo A A
authors.initials: PA
authors.lastname: Esquef
authors.forename: Paavo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Alku
authors.forename: Vesa
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Välimäki
authors.forename: Mari
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tervaniemi
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D001076:Aptitude / Q000502:physiology*; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation / Q000502:physiology; D004569:Electroencephalography; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D009146:Music; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology