Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Music and language share many similarities, yet music does not elicit a response in the language brain areas in adults with typical amounts of music experience, and patients with aphasia show preserved music ability. However, this dissociation might not generalize across development or expertise: it may not yet be present in children, who have limited experience with language and music, or it may be diminished in musicians with extensive music training. To evaluate these possibilities, we here used a precision fMRI approach to examine the responses in the language areas of children (aged 4-16 years, n=80) and adult musicians (n=10) to music. We found that the results obtained previously for non-musician adults replicate in two new control samples and, critically, generalize to both of the newly tested populations: the language areas are already selective for language relative to music in young children, showing no age-related change from early to late childhood, and remain selective despite extensive music training in highly experienced musicians. Thus, it appears that the amount of music exposure and practice have little effect on how the language brain areas respond to music. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: For centuries, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have noted similarities between language and music, leading to the hypothesis that these two domains may share processing mechanisms in the human brain. This hypothesis has not found empirical support: in adults with typical amounts of musical experience, language and music processing appear to draw on distinct systems. Here we asked whether the amount of experience with music affects this dissociation. We tested both children, who have less music and language experience than a typical adult, and highly trained musicians with extensive music experience, and found that the language system does not respond to music in either of these populations. These findings suggest that selectivity for language is not affected by music experience.
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: National Science Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Ellison Medical Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Simons Center for the Social Brain, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Awards: How Does the Functional Organization of the Human Brain Arise in Development?, G3210145577, Computational neuroimaging of human auditory cortex, Understanding how experience shapes language development through comparisons of large language models and neural representations, Computational Neuroscience of Language Processing in the Human Brain
OpenAlex ID: W7211969158