ArticleFrontiers in psychology2017
A Joint Prosodic Origin of Language and Music.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Tuned to language: the influence of musicality on phonaesthetic judgments.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Unifying the gestural and the vocal in the evolution of culture, the arts, and the brain.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The role of musical pitch in long-distance defensive signaling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Music is scaled, while speech is not: A cross-cultural analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The role of musical aspects of language in human cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Review
- Speech prosody enhances the neural processing of syntax.Communications biology · 2024Article
- The performing arts combined: the triad of music, dance, and narrative.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Music and verbal ability - a twin study of genetic and environmental associations.Psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts · 2023Article
- The (Co)Evolution of Language and Music Under Human Self-Domestication.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2023Article
- Isochrony and rhythmic interaction in ape duetting.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Testosterone, oxytocin and co-operation: A hypothesis for the origin and function of music.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- The Musical Abilities, Pleiotropy, Language, and Environment (MAPLE) Framework for Understanding Musicality-Language Links Across the Lifespan.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2022Review
- Human Genomics and the Biocultural Origin of Music.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Melody complexity of infants' cry and non-cry vocalisations increases across the first six months.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- The Pastoral Origin of Semiotically Functional Tonal Organization of Music.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Vocal Parameters of Speech and Singing Covary and Are Related to Vocal Attractiveness, Body Measures, and Sociosexuality: A Cross-Cultural Study.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the mnemonic effect of songs after stroke.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2019Article
- Human roars communicate upper-body strength more effectively than do screams or aggressive and distressed speech.PloS one · 2019Article
- Poor neuro-motor tuning of the human larynx: a comparison of sung and whistled pitch imitation.Royal Society open science · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Vocal theories of the origin of language rarely make a case for the precursor functions that underlay the evolution of speech. The vocal expression of emotion is unquestionably the best candidate for such a precursor, although most evolutionary models of both language and speech ignore emotion and prosody altogether. I present here a model for a joint prosodic precursor of language and music in which ritualized group-level vocalizations served as the ancestral state. This precursor combined not only affective and intonational aspects of prosody, but also holistic and combinatorial mechanisms of phrase generation. From this common stage, there was a bifurcation to form language and music as separate, though homologous, specializations. This separation of language and music was accompanied by their (re)unification in songs with words.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.