JACKENDOFF (2009) Parallels and Nonparallels between Language and Music

Be cautious in making strong connections without a properly laid out account for comparison.

The ability and desire to imitate others' vocal production.

The syllable.

Engaging in jointly intended actions.

It may parallel speech production.

That it is acquired through general-purpose learning plus social interaction abilities.

The capacities involved in acquiring and using them.

Actually pouring water into the machine from the pot.

Invent new items—words or tunes—that others can imitate.

They denote co-Heads of the Preparation.

How much of the language acquisition capacity is special-purpose versus general-purpose learning.

Both tend to go down at the end, but only melodies have discrete pitches.

Hands.

It enables the building of a culturally shared repertoire of words and songs.

The formulation and execution of complex actions.

What do music and language share that makes them distinct from other human activities?

It places constraints on both but does not significantly influence their formal structure.

Offer information, make requests, ask questions, give instructions, negotiate, and construct arguments.

Routines like turning on the faucet are integrated with the stored coffee-making routine.

It is embedded in social and cultural interaction.

Creating expectations of what is to come.

It is mentioned in the context of language structure and syntax.

Prolongational structure has no parts of speech and encodes the stability of pitch-events.

To enhance mood, often perceived subliminally.

It is a recursive headed hierarchy that integrates multiple subactions.

Intonational phrasing.

The central issue is what constitutes musical understanding for individuals.

No, it cannot be translated like linguistic meaning.

Both involve sound production.

They need a system of rules or structural schemata to integrate novel stimuli.

Meaning relations among words in a form amenable to phonological expression.

Both are structured rhythmically by similar metrical systems based on a hierarchical metrical grid.

It shares features with both syntactic and prolongational trees.

It is similar to visual segmentation and involves recursive segmentation into motives, phrases, and sections.

It focuses on how language is instantiated in speakers' minds.

They differ in rhythmic structure, use of pitch, meaning (propositional vs. affective), and hierarchical structures.

They make use of alliteration, rhythmic patterning, and counterpoint.

He concludes that the evidence suggests a more optimistic view ('the glass is half full').

Research on tone deafness and amusia.

Religious music conveys transcendence and spirituality, while dance tunes stimulate body movement.

The differences between them and the parallels shared with other cognitive capacities.

Music cannot be put to propositional use, while language can convey propositional information.

Function in music encodes different aspects than syntax in language.

Broca's area.

That there is a rich innate language-specific Universal Grammar.

They are at ceiling for language but show variability in musical ability based on exposure and talent.

The lack of a properly laid out account of another cognitive capacity for comparison.

Musical patterns resemble linguistic clichés but do not carry conceptual meaning like words do.

To convey the rhythm of work and the affect of coordinated action.

Songs sung in collective situations, such as around a campfire or in a bar.

In music, a single note can sub-tend multiple beats, allowing for subdivision of beats.

Recursion, the use of memory, and the need for learning and a social context.

Propositional or conceptual thought.

Language uses a repertoire of speech sounds, while music is based on a structured space of pitches.

Claims for an innate music capacity have been less politicized and weaker than for language.

It serves for tone differentiation, as seen in Chinese and many West African languages.

Linguistic utterances are built from words and syntax, while musical pieces are built from tones and patterns.

Prolongational structure as defined in GTTM.

Patterns of tensing and relaxing as music moves between stability and new points of stability.

They share considerable general characteristics, including metrical structure and some brain areas.

They borrow from music, employing rhythm and rhyme to evoke affect.

The noun/verb or subject/predicate/object distinctions in language.

Intonation involves continuous transitions between pitches, while tonal pitch spaces have fixed pitches.

Enhancement of affect associated with an activity.

Tones are determined by the words in a sentence and cannot function as a tonic.

Syntactic structure, which is hierarchical and categorized.

Things that are done to restore the status quo ante.

Measure water into the pot.

That they are (almost) the same thing.

Language conveys propositional thought, while music enhances affect.

The hypothesis that language and music evolved as a single capacity that later split.

They might be an evolutionarily older function, appropriated by both language and music.

Local variation in note lengths in music correlates with local variation in syllable lengths in language.

Every culture has a local variant of both language and music.

Fine-scale voluntary control of vocal production.

That music is 'auditory cheesecake,' constructed from parts of other capacities.

Both require substantial memory capacity for storing representations.

It consists of nodes belonging to categories like Noun or Adjective Phrase, with a head element.

What capacities are shared by language and music, but not by other cognitive domains?

Tones are superimposed on an overall intonation contour and can drift down, unlike fixed musical pitches.

The category of a phrase is determined by its head category.