The effect of musical training and language background on vocal imitation of pitch in speech and song.

Vocal imitation plays a critical function in the development and use of both language and music. Previous studies have reported more accurate imitation for sung pitch than spoken pitch, which might be attributed to the structural differences in acoustic signals and/or the distinct mental representations of pitch patterns across speech and music. The current study investigates the interaction between bottom-up (i.

Singing ability is related to vocal emotion recognition: Evidence for shared sensorimotor processing across speech and music.

The ability to recognize emotion in speech is a critical skill for social communication. Motivated by previous work that has shown that vocal emotion recognition accuracy varies by musical ability, the current study addressed this relationship using a behavioral measure of musical ability (i.e.

Spontaneous Production Rates in Music and Speech.

Individuals typically produce auditory sequences, such as speech or music, at a consistent spontaneous rate or tempo. We addressed whether spontaneous rates would show patterns of convergence across the domains of music and language production when the same participants spoke sentences and performed melodic phrases on a piano. Although timing plays a critical role in both domains, different communicative and motor constraints apply in each case and so it is not clear whether music and speech would display similar timing mechanisms.

Corrigendum: Children With Reading Difficulty Rely on Unimodal Neural Processing for Phonemic Awareness.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.

Children With Reading Difficulty Rely on Unimodal Neural Processing for Phonemic Awareness.

Phonological awareness skills in children with reading difficulty (RD) may reflect impaired automatic integration of orthographic and phonological representations. However, little is known about the underlying neural mechanisms involved in phonological awareness for children with RD. Eighteen children with RD, ages 9-13, participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study designed to assess the relationship of two constructs of phonological awareness, phoneme synthesis, and phoneme analysis, with crossmodal rhyme judgment.

Pitch-specific contributions of auditory imagery and auditory memory in vocal pitch imitation.

Vocal imitation guides both music and language development. Despite the developmental significance of this behavior, a sizable minority of individuals are inaccurate at vocal pitch imitation. Although previous research suggested that inaccurate pitch imitation results from deficient sensorimotor associations between pitch perception and vocal motor planning, the cognitive processes involved in sensorimotor translation are not clearly defined.