Early selectivity for vocal and musical sounds: electrophysiological evidence from an adaptation paradigm.
There is growing interest in characterizing the neural basis of music perception and, in particular, assessing how similar, or not, it is to that of speech. To further explore this question, we employed an EEG adaptation paradigm in which we compared responses to short sounds belonging to the same category, either speech (pseudo-sentences) or music (piano or violin), depending on whether they were immediately preceded by a same- or different-category sound. We observed a larger reduction in the N100 component magnitude in response to musical sounds when they were preceded by music (either the same or different instrument) than by speech. In contrast, the N100 amplitude was not affected by the preceding stimulus category in the case of speech. For P200 component, we observed a diminution of amplitude when speech sounds were preceded speech, compared to music. No such decrease was found when we compared the responses to music sounds. These differences in the processing of speech and music are consistent with the proposal that some degree of category selectivity for these two classes of complex stimuli already occurs at early stages of auditory processing, possibly subserved by partly separated neuronal populations.
Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music (CRBLM), Montreal, QC, Canada.|Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Douglas Mental Health University Institute, 6875 LaSalle Boulevard, Montreal, QC, H4H 1R3, Canada.
Simon
S
Rigoulot
Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music (CRBLM), Montreal, QC, Canada.|Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Douglas Mental Health University Institute, 6875 LaSalle Boulevard, Montreal, QC, H4H 1R3, Canada.
Jorge L
JL
Armony
D000222:Adaptation, Physiological; D000328:Adult; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D013067:Speech Perception
ERPs; music; neural adaptation; neural selectivity; speech prosody; voice