Musique et langage: Specificites, interactions et associations spatiales

The purpose of this work was to examine the functional specificity of musical pitch processing and representation. To this aim, we compared musical pitch processing to (1) the phonological processing of speech and (2) the spatial associations evoked by ordered sequences. The four studies described here all use classical methods of cognitive psychology, which have been adapted to our research question. We have employed Garner's (1974) speeded classification task (Study 1), the analysis of illusory conjunctions in memory (Study 2), the additivity of the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of event-related potentials (Study 3), as well as the observation of spatial associations of response codes (Study 4).;In the fourth study, we compared pitch processing to another domain: spatial cognition. We showed that both musicians and non-musicians map pitch onto space, in that they associate low-pitched tones to the lower spatial field and high-pitched tones to the higher spatial field. Both groups of participants also associated low pitched-tones with the left and high-pitched tones with the right, but this association was automatic only in musicians. Finally, more complex musical stimuli such as melodic intervals evoked these spatial associations in the horizontal plane only in musicians.;This work contributes to the understanding of music cognition in several ways. First, we have shown that consonants and vowels differ in their interactions with music, an idea related to the contrasting roles of these phonemes in language evolution. Second, the work on the spatial representation of pitch opens the path to research that will help uncover the potential links between musical and spatial abilities.;Keywords: phonology – vowels – consonants – intervals – musical pitch – memory – song SPARC effect – SMARC effect – mismatch negativity.;The three first studies examined, in non˙musician participants, the specificity of pitch processing compared to phoneme processing in songs. Studies 1 and 2 revealed a surprising effect of phoneme category on their interactions with melodic processing: vowels were more integrated with melody than were consonants. This was true for both on-line processing of sung nonwords (Study 1) and for the memory traces of these nonwords (Study 2, using a forced-choice recognition task allowing the occurrence of illusory conjunctions). The difference between vowels and consonants was not due to acoustic-phonetic properties such as phoneme sonority. The results of the third study showed that the MMN in response to pitch and to vowel deviations was not additive and that its brain topography did not differ as a function of the kind of deviation. This suggests that vowel processing is not independent from pitch processing, even at the pre-attentive level.