Fetal hearing experiences shape the linguistic and musical preferences of neonates. From the very first moment after birth, newborns prefer their native language, recognize their mother's voice, and show a greater responsiveness to lullabies presented during pregnancy. Yet, the neural underpinnings of this experience inducing plasticity have…

The present article aims to spur interest in the pedagogical potential of translating musicalized texts, a genre that for a long time has remained on the periphery of Applied Translation Studies. First, it provides a broad overview of the various theoretical perspectives that the academic community has had throughout history on the translation of…

Purpose: A fundamental feature of human speech is variation, including the manner of phonation, as exemplified in the case of whispered speech. In this study, we employed whispered speech to examine an unresolved issue about congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical pitch processing, which also affects speech pitch processing…

Adult second language (L2) learning often exhibits great variability in its rate and outcome. Although research shows that learning trajectories are partly shaped by social and contextual factors (e.g. Larson-Hall, 2008), certain learner factors play an important role in enhancing L2 pronunciation learning by helping L2 learners notice and process…

Infants rapidly learn language in their home environments. Between 6 and 12 months of age, infants' ability to process the building blocks of speech (i.e., phonetic information) develops quickly, and this ability predicts later language development. Typically, developing infants in a monolingual language environment rapidly tune in to the phonetic…

Electrophysiological studies investigating similarities between music and language perception have relied exclusively on the signal averaging technique, which does not adequately represent oscillatory aspects of electrical brain activity that are relevant for higher cognition. The current study investigated the patterns of brain oscillations…

We tested whether the emergence of familiarity to a melody may trigger or co-occur with the processing of the concept(s) conveyed by emotions to, or semantic association with, the melody. With this objective, we recorded ERPs while participants were presented with highly familiar and less familiar melodies in a gating paradigm. The ERPs time…

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…

Harmonic priming studies have provided evidence that musical expectations influence sung phoneme monitoring, with facilitated processing for phonemes sung on tonally related (expected) chords in comparison to less-related (less-expected) chords [Bigand, Tillmann, Poulin, D'Adamo, and Madurell (2001). "The effect of harmonic context on phoneme…

Childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a proposed speech disorder subtype that interferes with motor planning and/or programming, affecting prosody in many cases. Pilot data (Peter & Stoel-Gammon, 2005) were consistent with the notion that deficits in timing accuracy in speech and music-related tasks may be associated with CAS. This study…

Argues that early childhood experiences with processes as diverse as language, mathematics, emotion, and music determine which neurons grow and remain active in the brain. Early exposure to these processes results in receptive programming. Discusses the implications for schools, teachers, and parents. (MJP)

These 2 volumes include papers and abstracts of papers presented at the August 2002 "The Way We Think" conference in Denmark. Papers and abstracts of papers in the two volumes include: "Blending and Conceptual Disintegration" (Anders Hougaard); "Levels of Blending, Disintegration, and Language Evolution" (Carl Bache); "Conceptual Integration,…