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Preserved processing of musical syntax in a person with agrammatic aphasia

L. Robert Slevc1*, Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah1 and Sadhvi Saxena1
  • 1 University of Maryland, College Park, United States

A growing body of work suggests that processing hierarchical structure in language and in music rely on shared systems (review: Slevc, 2012), however this conclusion is tempered by neuropsychological dissociations between linguistic and musical processing (i.e., aphasia and amusia; review: Peretz, 2006). An influential reconciliation comes from Patel’s (2003) shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (SSIRH), which suggests that evidence for shared processes reflect reliance on shared syntactic integration processes whereas dissociations result from damage to domain-specific syntactic representations. The SSIRH thus predicts that patients with deficits in the processing of linguistic syntax–such as agrammatic aphasics–should show parallel deficits in musical structural (harmonic) processing. This prediction is countered by findings of impaired harmonic processing in patients with (apparently) spared linguistic syntactic processing (e.g., Sammler et al., 2011), however evidence for the opposite dissociation–preserved harmonic processing in agrammatic aphasia–is lacking. While there are reports of preserved musical abilities despite global aphasia (Basso & Capitani, 1985) or severe Wernicke’s aphasia (Luria, Tsvetkova, & Futer, 1965), of preserved reading and writing of music in the face of alexia and agraphia (Signoret et al., 1987), and of preserved musical sound naming in the face of severe anomia (Tzortzis et al., 2000), no study (to our knowledge) has demonstrated preserved musical structural processing in an agrammatic patient. In addition, at least one group of agrammatic aphasics did not show normal effects of harmonic priming, and showed a relationship between accuracy on acceptability judgments in language and in music (Patel et al., 2008). Here, we report a detailed analysis of structural processing in language and in music in HV, a 63 year-old native English-speaking female musician who sustained a left peri-Sylvian stroke. She showed a profile of Broca’s aphasia with agrammatic speech (WAB aphasia quotient = 33.6; Fluency = 2/10, Proportion grammatical sentences = 0.04). We evaluated HV’s linguistic and musical structural processing, as well as that of twelve age-matched control participants, using matched “off-line” acceptability judgment tasks and “on-line” priming tasks. HV performed much worse than controls when judging sentences that sometimes contained morphosyntactic violations (Crawford’s t = -3.84, p < .01), however she performed as well as controls when judging chord sequences that sometimes contained a chord from a distant key (t = -0.47). Similarly, HV showed no sensitivity to syntactic violations in a word-monitoring task, unlike control participants (t = -4.81, p < .001), however she showed normal harmonic priming effects (t = -0.30). HV thus showed a classical dissociation between linguistic and musical syntactic processing (assessed with Crawford & Garthwaite’s (2005) Revised Standardized Difference Test) for both off-line (t = 2.52, p < .05) and on-line (t = 2.65, p < .05) measures. To our knowledge, this is the first non-anecdotal report of a patient with agrammatic aphasia demonstrating preserved harmonic processing abilities, posing a challenge for claims of a straightforward link between syntactic processing in language and music.

References

Basso, A., & Capitani, E. (1985). Spared musical abilities in a conductor with global aphasia and ideomotor apraxia. Journal of the Neurological Sciences, (48), 407–12.

Crawford, J. R., & Garthwaite, P. H. (2005). Testing for suspected impairments and dissociations in single-case studies in neuropsychology: evaluation of alternatives using monte carlo simulations and revised tests for dissociations. Neuropsychology, 19(3), 318–31.

Luria, A. R., Tsvetkova, L. S., & Futer, D. S. (1965). Aphasia in a composer. Journal of the Neurological Sciences, 2, 288-92.

Patel, A. D. (2003). Language, music, syntax and the brain. Nature Neuroscience, 6(7), 674–81.

Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., Wassenaar, M., & Hagoort, P. (2008). Musical syntactic processing in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. Aphasiology, 22(7), 776–89.

Peretz, I. (2006). The nature of music from a biological perspective. Cognition, 100(1), 1–32.

Sammler, D., Koelsch, S., & Friederici, A. D. (2011). Are left fronto-temporal brain areas a prerequisite for normal music-syntactic processing? Cortex, 47(6), 659–73.

Slevc, L. R. (2012). Language and music: sound, structure, and meaning. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 3(4), 483–92.

Tzortzis, C., Goldblum, M. C., Dang, M., Forette, F., & Boller, F. (2000). Absence of amusia and preserved naming of musical instruments in an aphasic composer. Cortex, 36(2), 227–42.

Keywords: Aphasia, agrammatism, Amusia, language and music, syntactic processing

Conference: Academy of Aphasia -- 52nd Annual Meeting, Miami, FL, United States, 5 Oct - 7 Oct, 2014.

Presentation Type: Platform or poster presentation

Topic: Not student

Citation: Slevc L, Faroqi-Shah Y and Saxena S (2014). Preserved processing of musical syntax in a person with agrammatic aphasia. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia -- 52nd Annual Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2014.64.00061

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Received: 29 Apr 2014; Published Online: 04 Aug 2014.

* Correspondence: Dr. L. Robert Slevc, University of Maryland, College Park, College Park, Maryland, 20742, United States, slevc@umd.edu