ArticleHuman brain mapping2025
Temporal Structure of Music Improves the Cortical Encoding of Speech.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Rhythm Processing Across Development: Origins, Links to Language Processing, and Perspectives for Intervention.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Testing differential effects of periodicity and predictability in auditory rhythmic cueing of concurrent speech.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Long- and short-term musical training has been proposed to improve the efficiency of cortical tracking of speech, which refers to the synchronization of brain oscillations and the acoustic temporal structure of external stimuli. Here, we study how musical sequences with different rhythm structures can guide the temporal dynamics of auditory oscillations synchronized with the speech envelope. For this purpose, we investigated the effects of prior exposure to rhythmically structured musical sequences on cortical tracking of speech in Basque-Spanish bilingual adults (Experiment 1; N = 33, 22 female, Mean age = 25 years). We presented participants with sentences in Basque and Spanish preceded by musical sequences that differed in their rhythmical structure. The rhythmical structure of the musical sequences was created to (1) reflect and match the syllabic structure of the sentences, (2) reflect a regular rhythm but not match the syllabic structure of the sentences, and (3) follow an irregular rhythm. Participants' brain responses were recorded using electroencephalography, and speech-brain coherence in the delta and theta bands was calculated. Results showed stronger speech-brain coherence in the delta band in the first condition, but only for Spanish stimuli. A follow-up experiment including a subset of the initial sample (Experiment 2; N = 20) was conducted to investigate whether language-specific stimuli properties influenced the Basque results. Similar to Experiment 1, we found stronger speech-brain coherence in the delta and theta bands when the sentences were preceded by musical sequences that matched their syllabic structure. These results suggest that not only the regularity in music is crucial for influencing cortical tracking of speech, but so is adjusting this regularity to optimally reflect the rhythmic characteristics of listeners' native language(s). Despite finding some language-specific differences across frequencies, we showed that rhythm, inherent in musical signals, guides the adaptation of brain oscillations, by adapting the temporal dynamics of the oscillatory activity to the rhythmic scaffolding of the musical signal.
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.