Trial reportPloS one2015
Music and Language Syntax Interact in Broca's Area: An fMRI Study.
Trial report in PloS one, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Music and trust formation: a scoping review of neurobiological convergence and research priorities.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Pooled it
- Selectivity for high-level language processing is highly localized in individual brains.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The neurobiology of human sequential signal prediction: Insights from language, music, and mathematics.Neuroscience research · 2026Review
- Geometric properties of musical scales constitute a representational primitive in melodic processing.iScience · 2025Article
- Linguistic and Musical Syntax Processing in Autistic and Non-Autistic Individuals: An Event-Related Potential (ERP) Study.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2025Article
- Article
- Musical Sophistication and Multilingualism: Effects on Arcuate Fasciculus Characteristics.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Beyond the ears: A review exploring the interconnected brain behind the hierarchical memory of music.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Subcortical responses to music and speech are alike while cortical responses diverge.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The Language Network Reliably "Tracks" Naturalistic Meaningful Nonverbal Stimuli.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Article
- Functional Organization of Auditory and Reward Systems in Aging.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2023Article
- Intraoperative cortical localization of music and language reveals signatures of structural complexity in posterior temporal cortex.iScience · 2023Article
- The human language system, including its inferior frontal component in "Broca's area," does not support music perception.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Neuroimaging evidence for the direct role of auditory scene analysis in object perception.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- The Association between Music and Language in Children: A State-of-the-Art Review.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- A reconceptualization of sentence production in post-stroke agrammatic aphasia: the synergistic processing bottleneck model.Frontiers in language sciences · 2023Article
- Neural mechanisms of musical structure and tonality, and the effect of musicianship.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Cytoarchitectonic mapping of the human frontal operculum-New correlates for a variety of brain functions.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- Music-experience-related and musical-error-dependent activations in the brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Instrumental music and language are both syntactic systems, employing complex, hierarchically-structured sequences built using implicit structural norms. This organization allows listeners to understand the role of individual words or tones in the context of an unfolding sentence or melody. Previous studies suggest that the brain mechanisms of syntactic processing may be partly shared between music and language. However, functional neuroimaging evidence for anatomical overlap of brain activity involved in linguistic and musical syntactic processing has been lacking. In the present study we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in conjunction with an interference paradigm based on sung sentences. We show that the processing demands of musical syntax (harmony) and language syntax interact in Broca's area in the left inferior frontal gyrus (without leading to music and language main effects). A language main effect in Broca's area only emerged in the complex music harmony condition, suggesting that (with our stimuli and tasks) a language effect only becomes visible under conditions of increased demands on shared neural resources. In contrast to previous studies, our design allows us to rule out that the observed neural interaction is due to: (1) general attention mechanisms, as a psychoacoustic auditory anomaly behaved unlike the harmonic manipulation, (2) error processing, as the language and the music stimuli contained no structural errors. The current results thus suggest that two different cognitive domains-music and language-might draw on the same high level syntactic integration resources in Broca's area.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.