ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the evidence for the influence of musical training and musical abilities on different aspects of language processing and executive functions. Music and language produce phenomenologically different experiences and require different abilities. Adult musicians outperformed non-musicians on tests of cognitive flexibility and working memory, but not on tests of inhibitory control. In the cascade interpretation, increased sensitivity to low-level acoustic parameters such as pitch or duration, that are common to music and speech, drives the influence of musical training at different levels of language processing. Whether similar levels of processing in language and music activate similar brain regions, and whether musical expertise influences brain structures considered as speech-specific, are important issues for our understanding of the anatomo-functional organization of the brain. The N400 effect was larger over centro-parietal regions in musicians and more frontally distributed in non-musicians, which was taken as evidence that musicians were more efficient at integrating the meaning of novel words into semantic networks.
