Anna Fiveash

• B.Psych(Hons); M.A.; PhD
• PostDoc Position at Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, French National Centre for Scientific Research

Music and language are two human behaviours that are linked through their innateness, universality, and complexity. Recent research has investigated the communicative similarities between music and language and has found syntactic, semantic, and emotional dimensions in both. Emotional communication is thought to be related to the prosody of languag...

Prediction is a fundamental aspect of cognition that allows us to anticipate what is about tooccur, and when. However, little is known about how these predictions are related, andwhether they differ depending on stimulus domain (i.e., music, speech). To investigate thesequestions, content and timing predictability were comparably manipulated within...

In English, voiceless stop consonants (i.e., /p-t-k/) have long voice onset times (VOT), and voiced stop consonants (i.e., /b-d-g/) have short VOTs. In French, voiceless stop consonants have short VOTs while voiced stop consonants have pre-lag VOTs, which can make late second language (L2) learning of English difficult. The Asymmetric Sampling in T...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Exposure to musical rhythms has been shown to influence the perception of subsequently presented speech. Until now, this effect has only been studied in native language (L1) processing. The present study investigated whether rhythmic priming could also benefit second language (L2) processing. A musical rhythmic priming experiment was designed based...

Syntax and prediction are fundamental elements supporting the processing of language and music. Implicitly learned syntactic rules and principles allow perceivers to form expectations (or predictions) about the syntactic combination of individual elements, resulting in facilitated processing of upcoming expected events. The current chapter discusse...

Recently reported links between rhythm and grammar processing have opened new perspectives for using rhythm in clinical interventions for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Previous research using the rhythmic priming paradigm has shown improved performance on language tasks after regular rhythmic primes compared to control condit...

Studies of rhythm processing and of reward have progressed separately, with little connection between the two. However, consistent links between rhythm and reward are beginning to surface, with research suggesting that synchronization to rhythm is rewarding, and that this rewarding element may in turn also boost this synchronization. The current mi...

Speech therapy can be part of the care pathway for patients recovering from comas and presenting a disorder of consciousness (DOC). Although there are no official recommendations for speech therapy follow-up, neuroscientific studies suggest that relevant stimuli may have beneficial effects on the behavioral assessment of patients with a DOC. In two...

Humans have a remarkable capacity for perceiving and producing rhythm. Rhythmic competence is often viewed as a single concept, with participants who perform more or less accurately on a single rhythm task. However, research is revealing numerous sub-processes and competencies involved in rhythm perception and production, which can be selectively i...

Rhythm perception involves strong auditory-motor connections that can be enhanced with movement. However, it is unclear whether just seeing someone moving to a rhythm can enhance auditory-motor coupling, resulting in stronger entrainment. Rhythmic priming studies show that presenting regular rhythms before naturally spoken sentences can enhance gra...

Objective: Music and speech are complex signals containing regularities in how they unfold in time. Similarities between music and speech/language in terms of their auditory features, rhythmic structure, and hierarchical structure have led to a large body of literature suggesting connections between the two domains. However, the precise underlying...

Auditory rhythms create powerful expectations for the listener. Rhythmic cues with the same temporal structure as subsequent sentences enhance processing compared with irregular or mismatched cues. In the present study, we focus on syllable detection following matched rhythmic cues. Cues were aligned with subsequent sentences at the syllable (low-l...

Research has shown that regular rhythmic primes improve grammaticality judgments of subsequently presented sentences compared with irregular rhythmic primes. In the theoretical framework of dynamic attending, regular rhythmic primes are suggested to act as driving rhythms to entrain neural oscillations. These entrained oscillations then sustain onc...

Although a growing literature points to substantial variation in speech/language abilities related to individual differences in musical abilities, mainstream models of communication sciences and disorders have not yet incorporated these individual differences into childhood speech/language development. This article reviews three sources of evidence...

When listening to temporally regular rhythms, most people are able to extract the beat. Evidence suggests that the neural mechanism underlying this ability is the phase alignment of endogenous oscillations to the external stimulus, allowing for the prediction of upcoming events (i.e., dynamic attending). Relatedly, individuals with dyslexia may hav...

Regular musical rhythms orient attention over time and facilitate processing. Previous research has shown that regular rhythmic stimulation benefits subsequent syntax processing in children with dyslexia and specific language impairment. The present EEG study examined the influence of a rhythmic musical prime on the P600 late evoked-potential, asso...

Two separate lines of research have examined the influence of song and infant-directed speech (IDS – a speech register that includes some melodic features) on language learning, suggesting that the use of musical attributes in speech input can enhance language learning. However, the benefits of these two types of stimuli have never been directly co...

How did human vocalizations come to acquire meaning in the evolution of our species? Charles Darwin proposed that language and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of sounds in nature. This protolanguage is thought to have diverged into two separate systems, with speech prioritizing referent...

Music and language are complex hierarchical systems in which individual elements are systematically combined to form larger, syntactic structures. Suggestions that music and language share syntactic processing resources have relied on evidence that syntactic violations in music interfere with syntactic processing in language. However, syntactic vio...

How did human vocalizations come to acquire meaning in the evolution of our species? Charles Darwin proposed that language and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of sounds in nature. This protolanguage is thought to have diverged into two separate systems, with speech prioritizing referent...

Both music and language rely on the processing of spectral (pitch, timbre) and temporal (rhythm) information to create structure and meaning from incoming auditory streams. Previous behavioural results have shown that interrupting a melodic stream with unexpected changes in timbre leads to reduced syntactic processing. Such findings suggest that sy...

It has been suggested that music and language are processed with shared cognitive resources. As these processing resources are limited in capacity, the concurrent presentation of music and language should produce interference, such that reduced processing is observed in one or both domains. The aim of this thesis was to investigate shared syntactic...

The effects of music on the brain have been extensively researched, and numerous connections have been found between music and language, music and emotion, and music and cognitive processing. Despite this work, these three research areas have never before been drawn together into a single research paradigm. This is significant as their combination...

The cognitive processing similarities between music and language is an emerging field of study, with research finding evidence for shared processing pathways in the brain, especially in relation to syntax. This research combines theory from the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (SSIRH; Patel, 2008) and syntactic working memory (SWM)...