PROCESSING PROSODIC AND MUSICAL PATTERNS - A NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION

To explore the relationship between the processing of melodic and rhyt hmic patterns in speech and music, we tested the prosodic and musical discrimination abilities of two ''amusic'' subjects who suffered from music perception deficits secondary to bilateral brain damage. Prosodi c discrimination was assessed with sentence pairs where members of a p air differed by intonation or rhythm, and musical discrimination was t ested using musical-phrase pairs derived from the prosody of the sente nce pairs. This novel technique was chosen to make task demands as com parable as possible across domains. One amusic subject showed good per formance on both linguistic and musical discrimination tasks, while th e other had difficulty with both tasks. In both subjects, level of per formance was statistically similar across domains, suggesting shared n eural resources for prosody and music. Further tests suggested that pr osody and music may overlap in the processes used to maintain auditory patterns in working memory. (C) 1998 Academic Press.