Advances in the Neurocognition of Music and Language

Dear Colleagues,

Neurocomparative music and language research has seen major advances over the past two decades: The Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH) has now come of age, fully matured, as has the Modularity of Music Processing, and yet research on the relationship between music and language has never lost its appeal. On the contrary, the field has left no stone unturned to explore neurofunctional similarities of syntax and rhythm, pitch and meaning, their emotional and communicative power, in ontogeny and phylogeny. Research on perceptual and cognitive transfer between domains has recognized the signs of times by exploring learning and cognitive reserve in aging and the benefits of neural entrainment, amongst others. Methods have been refined and the explanatory value of neural overlap has been questioned, all to draw a more nuanced picture on what is shared and what is not, and what this knowledge earns practitioners. The goal of this Special Issue is to take a step back and showcase persistent neural analogies between musical and linguistic information processing and their entwined organization in human cognition, to scrutinize the limits of neural overlap and sharing, and to conclude on the applicability of the combined knowledge in pedagogy and therapy.

Dr. Daniela Sammler
Dr. Stefan Elmer
Guest Editors

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