Mireille Besson

• PhD, Habilitation
• Research Director at CNRS & Aix-Marseille University

Learning new words in an unfamiliar language is a complex endeavor that requires the orchestration of multiple perceptual and cognitive functions. Although the neural mechanisms governing word learning are becoming better understood, little is known about the predictive value of resting-state (RS) metrics for foreign word discrimination and word le...

Human beings continuously make use of learned associations to generate predictions about future occurrences in the environment. Such memory-related predictive processes provide a scaffold for learning in that mental representations of foreseeable events can be adjusted or strengthened based on a specific outcome. Learning the meaning of novel words...

Purpose This article aimed at investigating the neural underpinnings of music-to-language transfer effects at the pre-attentive level of processing. Method We conducted a longitudinal experiment with a test–training–retest procedure. Nonmusician adults were trained either on frequency (experimental group) or on intensity (control group) of harmoni...

The learning of new words is a challenge that accompanies human beings throughout the entire life span. Although the main electrophysiological markers of word learning have already been described, little is known about the performance-dependent neural machinery underlying this exceptional human faculty. Furthermore, it is currently unknown how word...

Previous studies evidenced transfer effects from professional music training to novel word learning. However, it is unclear whether such an advantage is driven by cascading, bottom–up effects from better auditory perception to semantic processing or by top–down influences from cognitive functions on perception. Moreover, the long-term effects of no...

Musical expertise has been shown to positively influence high-level speech abilities such as novel word learning. This study addresses the question whether low-level enhanced perceptual skills causally drives successful novel word learning. We used a longitudinal approach with psychoacoustic procedures to train 2 groups of nonmusicians either on pi...

The aim of this experiment was to use behavioral and electrophysiological methods to compare university students with dyslexia and matched skilled readers in a novel word learning experiment that included phonological categorization tasks, a word learning phase and a test phase with matching and semantic tasks. Specifically, we aimed at disentangli...

This study aimed at evaluating the impact of a classic music training program (Démos) on several aspects of the cognitive development of children from low socio-economic backgrounds. We were specifically interested in general intelligence, phonological awareness and reading abilities, and in other cognitive abilities that may be improved by music t...

Previous results showed a positive influence of music training on linguistic abilities at both attentive and preattentive levels. Here, we investigate whether six months of active music training is more efficient than painting training to improve the preattentive processing of phonological parameters based on durations that are often impaired in ch...

To investigate the modularity of language processing and, specifically, the question of whether the language module is informationally encapsulated, many experiments examined the impact of music expertise and music training on the language system (phonology, semantics and syntax). Finding positive evidence would argue against language as an indepen...

The present study investigated whether children with developmental dyslexia showed specific deficits in the perception of three phonetic features (voicing, place, and manner of articulation) in optimal (silence) and degraded listening conditions (envelope-coded speech versus noise), using both standard behavioral and electrophysiological measures....

Based on growing evidence suggesting that professional music training facilitates foreign language perception and learning, we examined the impact of musical expertise on the categorization of syllables including phonemes that did (/p/, /b/) or did not (/ph/) belong to the French repertoire by analyzing both behavior (error rates and reaction times...

Current models of speech and language processing postulate the involvement of two parallel processing streams (the dual stream model): a ventral stream involved in mapping sensory and phonological representations onto lexical and conceptual representations and a dorsal stream contributing to sound-to-motor mapping, articulation, and to how verbal i...

Children learn new words every day and this ability requires auditory perception, phoneme discrimination, attention, associative learning and semantic memory. Based on previous results showing that some of these functions are enhanced by music training, we investigated learning of novel words through picture-word associations in musically-trained a...

On the basis of previous results showing that music training positively influences different aspects of speech perception and cognition, the aim of this series of experiments was to test the hypothesis that adult professional musicians would learn the meaning of novel words through picture–word associations more efficiently than controls without mu...

18th World Congress of Psychophysiology of the International Organization of Psychophysiology (IOP), Havana, CUBA, AUG 31-SEP 04, 2016

The latest advances in cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience has brought from science fiction to reality the possibility of influencing our brain activity (Owen et al., 2010; Glannon, 2014; Gruzelier, 2014a). Better understanding of brain functioning and brain plasticity has allowed neuroscientists to transfer findings f...

Numerous arguments in the recent neuroscientific literature support the use of musical training as a therapeutic tool among the arsenal already available to therapists and educators for treating children with dyslexia. In the present study, we tested the efficacy of a specially-designed Cognitivo-Musical Training (CMT) method based upon three princ...

In the last decade, important discoveries have been made in cognitive neuroscience regarding brain plasticity and learning such as the mirror neurons system and the anatomo-functional organization of perceptual, cognitive and motor abilities.... Time has come to consider the societal impact of these findings. The aim of this Research Topic of Front...

This study was a two-armed parallel group design aimed at testing real world effectiveness of a music therapy (MT) intervention for children with severe neurological disorders. The control group received only the standard neurorestoration program and the experimental group received an additional MT “Auditory Attention plus Communication protocol” j...

In this chapter, we summarize the main results of a line of research whereby a comparative approach to language and music is adopted in order to better understand the functional architecture of the human brain. Although the comparison between language and music has not been one of Jean-Luc Nespoulous' primary scientific interests, he has always bee...

Cet article décrit un programme de recherche en neurosémiotique. L’idée principale consiste à proposer la composante N400 du potentiel évoqué comme «arbitre empirique » entre deux paradigmes de donation de sens : le paradigme fonctionnaliste des sciences cognitives, décrivant la séquence d’accès au lexique, et un paradigme réunissant le structurali...

The influence of semantic context on verb argument structure processing was investigated in two experiments using both ERP and behavioral measures. Participants were presented with sentences ending with syntactically and/or semantically congruous or incongruous noun phrases and they were asked to judge the overall acceptability of the sentences. Sy...

Context: Using natural connected speech, the aim of the present study was to examine the semantic congruity effect (i.e. the difference between semantically incongruous and congruous words) in sentence contexts that generate high or moderate final word expectancies. Methods: We used sentences with two levels of word expectancy in the auditory mo...

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the influence of musical expertise on the automatic perception of foreign syllables and harmonic sounds. Participants were Cuban students with high level of expertise in music or in visual arts and with the same level of general education and socio-economic background. We used a multi-feature Mismatch N...

Lee and Lei (2012) used a pitch task and a duration task in different blocks of trials and measured event-related potentials in 12 musicians and 24 non-musicians as they read musical scores. The authors claimed to disentangle pitch and duration processing. From the perspectives of cognitive neuropsychology there is great interest in studying the pr...

Increasing evidence suggests that musical expertise influences brain organization and brain functions. Moreover, results at the behavioral and neurophysiological levels reveal that musical expertise positively influences several aspects of speech processing, from auditory perception to speech production. In this review, we focus on the main results...

Lee and Lei (2012) used a pitch task and a duration task in different blocks of trials and measured event-related potentials in 12 musicians and 24 non-musicians as they read musical scores. The authors claimed to disentangle pitch and duration processing. From the perspectives of cognitive neuropsychology there is great interest in studying the pr...

L’un des buts actuels dans la recherche sur les étapes initiales de la schizophrénie consiste à tenter de proposer des marqueurs de vulnérabilité précoces, stables et objectifs. Dans cette revue, nous décrivons tout d’abord brièvement cette notion de marqueurs précoces, ou endophénotypes, notamment dans ses aspects de stabilité, de spécificité et d...

There are numerous arguments in the recent neuroscientific literature to support the use of musical training as a therapeutic tool in the arsenal already available to speech therapists for treating children with dyslexia. Among these arguments, some are indirect, such as the repeated demonstration of an effect of musical practice on the organizatio...

Musical training has been shown to positively influence linguistic abilities. To follow the developmental dynamics of this transfer effect at the preattentive level, we conducted a longitudinal study over 2 school years with nonmusician children randomly assigned to music or to painting training. We recorded the mismatch negativity (MMN), a cortica...

The role of music training in fostering brain plasticity and developing high cognitive skills, notably linguistic abilities, is of great interest from both a scientific and a societal perspective. Here, we report results of a longitudinal study over 2 years using both behavioral and electrophysiological measures and a test-training-retest procedure...

Previous ERP studies have shown that musicians detect a pitch change in spoken sentences better than non-musicians in both native (French, Schön et al., 2004) and unfamiliar (Portuguese, Marques et al., 2007) language. The aim of the present study was to further investigate differences between musicians and non-musicians in processing pitch changes...

This chapter further comments on Chapter 27. It focuses on four main points. First, it attempts to clarify what genetics can tell us about the common or distinct origins of music and speech. Second, it examines the evolution of the concept of modularity from Fodor (1983) to Fodor (2000/2003) and what remains of modularity. It argues that if modular...

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of musical expertise in 9-year-old children on passive (as reflected by MMN) and active (as reflected by discrimination accuracy) processing of speech sounds. Musician and nonmusician children were presented with a sequence of syllables that included standards and deviants in vowel frequency, vowel...

A same–different task was used to test the hypothesis that musical expertise improves the discrimination of tonal and segmental (consonant, vowel) variations in a tone language, Mandarin Chinese. Two four-word sequences (prime and target) were presented to French musicians and nonmusicians unfamiliar with Mandarin, and event-related brain potential...

Results of numerous experiments conducted over the past 15 years by using behavioural as well as brain imaging methods have shown that musical expertise influences brain anatomy, brain functions and behaviour. The musician’ brain is thus considered as a very good model of brain plasticity. Moreover, many results have demonstrated that musical exper...

After a brief historical perspective of the relationship between language and music, we review our work on transfer of training from music to speech that aimed at testing the general hypothesis that musicians should be more sensitive than non-musicians to speech sounds. In light of recent results in the literature, we argue that when long-term expe...

In this article, we focused on the identication of the perceptual properties of impacted materials to provide an intuitive control of an impact sound synthesizer. To investigate such properties, impact sounds from everyday life objects, made of different materials (Wood, Metal and Glass), were recorded and analyzed. These sounds were synthesized us...

The present study aimed to examine the influence of musical expertise on the metric and semantic aspects of speech processing. In two attentional conditions (metric and semantic tasks), musicians listened to short sentences ending in trisyllabic words that were semantically and/or metrically congruous or incongruous. Both ERPs and behavioral data w...

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of musical expertise in 9 year-old children on passive (as reflected by the Mismatch Negativity, MMN) and active (as reflected by discrimination accuracy) processing of speech sounds. Children on their way towards musicianship had 4 years of musical training, on average and nonmusicians had no othe...

Meaning is a key element of language but the question remains if non linguistic stimuli, like music or environmental sounds, can also evoke a meaning. The aim of the present experiments was to compare conceptual priming for auditory environmental scenes and for spoken French words using a cross-modal design with auditory scenes and words used both...

The aim of these experiments was to compare conceptual priming for linguistic and for a homogeneous class of nonlinguistic sounds, impact sounds, by using both behavioral (percentage errors and RTs) and electrophysiological measures (ERPs). Experiment 1 aimed at studying the neural basis of impact sound categorization by creating typical and ambigu...

The aim of this experiment was two-fold. Our first goal was to determine whether linguistic expertise influences the pre-attentive [as reflected by the Mismatch Negativity - (MMN)] and the attentive processing (as reflected by behavioural discrimination accuracy) of non-speech, harmonic sounds. The second was to directly compare the effects of ling...

This study aimed at investigating the effects of acoustic distance and of speaker variability on the pre-attentive and attentive perception of French vowels by French adult speakers. The electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded while participants watched a silent movie (Passive condition) and discriminated deviant vowels (Active condition). The audi...

Two experiments were conducted to examine the conceptual relation between words and nonmeaningful sounds. In order to reduce the role of linguistic mediation, sounds were recorded in such a way that it was highly unlikely to identify the source that produced them. Related and unrelated sound–word pairs were presented in Experiment 1 and the order o...

Former studies have shown that a pitch change in utterances in speech was detected accurately in both native (French) and unfamiliar (Portuguese) language and produced an early negativity and a late positivity in the event-related brain potentials (ERPs), more clearly marked in the native language (Schön et al., 2004; Marques et al., 2007). The pre...

Example of stimulus pair in condition same word/different melody (W = M≠). (0.22 MB WAV)

Pairs of sung words in each of the four experimental conditions, in one list of the Latin Square design (the first author can be contacted to obtain the other three lists), with each trisyllabic French word and the 3-note melody on which it was sung (one note per syllable). The melodies are represented in standard MIDI codes, where: C4 = 60, C#4 =...

Example of stimulus pair in condition different word/same melody (W≠ M = ) (0.22 MB WAV)

Example of stimulus pair in condition different word/different melody (W≠ M≠). (0.22 MB WAV)

Example of stimulus pair in condition same word/same melody (W = M = ). (0.22 MB WAV)

Language and music, two of the most unique human cognitive abilities, are combined in song, rendering it an ecological model for comparing speech and music cognition. The present study was designed to determine whether words and melodies in song are processed interactively or independently, and to examine the influence of attention on the processin...

Two fMRI experiments were conducted using song to investigate the domain specificity of linguistic and musical processing. In Experiment 1, participants listened to pairs of spoken words, "vocalise" (i.e., singing without words), and sung words while performing a same-different task. Results revealed bilateral involvement of middle and superior tem...

Résumé Dans la lignée des travaux de Pierre Schaeffer, le laboratoire Musique et Informatique de Marseille (MIM) a mis en évidence des figures temporelles sonores dénommées Unités Sémiotiques Temporelles (UST) qui correspondent à des segments musicaux qui possèdent, per se, une signification temporelle en raison de leur organisation morphologique e...

The aim of this study was to determine if two dimensions of song, the phonological part of lyrics and the melodic part of tunes, are processed in an independent or integrated way. In a series of five experiments, musically untrained participants classified bi-syllabic nonwords sung on two-tone melodic intervals. Their response had to be based on pi...

The aim of this study was to determine whether conceptual priming occurs between successively presented short musical pieces called Temporal Semantic Units (TSUs). Behavioral and ERP data were recorded while participants, experts and nonexperts in TSUs, were listening to pairs of TSUs and were asked to determine whether the target TSU evoked the sa...

This article summarizes the main evidence to date regarding links between the brain and music. Musical expertise, often linked to early and intensive learning, is associated with neuroanatomical distinctive features that have been demonstrated through modern neuroimaging techniques, especially magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These distinctive fea...

We conducted a longitudinal study with 32 nonmusician children over 9 months to determine 1) whether functional differences between musician and nonmusician children reflect specific predispositions for music or result from musical training and 2) whether musical training improves nonmusical brain functions such as reading and linguistic pitch proc...

In this paper, timbre perception of sounds from 3 different impacted materials (Wood, Metal and Glass) was examined using a categorization task. Natural sounds were recorded, analyzed and resynthesized and a sound morphing process was applied to construct sound continua between different materials. Participants were asked to categorize the sounds a...

In previous research, Saffran and colleagues [Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926-1928; Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606-621.] have shown that adults and...

Ce travail a pour but de mieux comprendre les mécanismes perceptifs et cognitifs mis en œuvre lors de l'écoute des sons, et en particulier, d'´étudier les relations entre les traitements cognitifs associés à la sémantique dans le langage et à la sémiotique des objets sonores (i.e. comment attribue-t-on un sens au son). Il vise également à mieux cer...

The present work investigates the relationship between semantic and prosodic (metric) processing in spoken language under 2 attentional conditions (semantic and metric tasks) by analyzing both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) data. Participants listened to short sentences ending in semantically and/or metrically congruous or incongruous...

The aim of this study was to determine whether musical expertise influences the detection of pitch variations in a foreign language that participants did not understand. To this end, French adults, musicians and nonmusicians, were presented with sentences spoken in Portuguese. The final words of the sentences were prosodically congruous (spoken at...

The current study is part of a larger project aiming at offering intuitive mappings for the control of synthesis models by semantic descriptions of sounds, i.e. simple verbal labels related to various feelings, emotions, gestures or motions. Hence, this work is directly related to the general problem of semiotics of sounds. We here put a special in...

Although it is commonly accepted that dyslexic children have auditory phonological deficits, the precise nature of these deficits remains unclear. This study examines potential pitch processing deficit in dyslexic children, and recovery after specific training, by measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioural responses to pitch ma...

We review a series of experiments aimed at studying pitch processing in music and speech. These studies were conducted with musician and non musician adults and children. We found that musical expertise improved pitch processing not only in music but also in speech. Demonstrating transfer of training between music and language has interesting appli...

This work is the result of an interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists from the fields of audio signal processing, phonetics and cognitive neuroscience aiming at studying the perception of modifications in meter, rhythm, semantics and harmony in language and music. A special time-stretching algorithm was developed to work with natural spe...

This experiment aimed at testing whether 8 weeks of musical training affect the ability of 8-year-old children to detect pitch changes in language. Twenty nonmusician children listened to linguistic phrases that ended with prosodically congruous words or with weak or strong pitch incongruities. We recorded reaction times, error rates, and event-rel...

One approach to comparing the neural bases of language and music is through the use of song, which is a unique and ecological combination of these two cognitive domains. In song, language and music are merged into one acoustic signal with two salient dimensions. By manipulating either the linguistic or musical dimensions (or both) of song and study...

The aim of this experiment was to determine whether eight weeks of musical training based on pitch processing could help eight-year-old children detect pitch changes in language. Results show that a relatively short exposure (eight weeks) to pitch processing in music exerts some influence on pitch processing in language. Therefore, these results ar...