![]() Although the specific origin of these advantages is not yet fully understood, it is supposed that shared neural networks, perceptual functions, and cognitive operations between the domains of speech and music may be one of the key features underlying cognitive facilitation 27, 35, 36. However, these behavioral advantages do not seem to be restricted to auditory tasks but can likewise be observed in several cognitive domains, including attention 32, short-term memory 33, working memory 34, and inhibition 10. This network perspective is supported, for example, by previous diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies demonstrating white matter differences (i.e., fractional anisotropy, radial diffusivity, or volume) between musicians and non-musicians in a substantial number of fiber tracts, including the arcuate fasciculus (AF) 13, 14, different subdivisions of the corpus callosum 15, 16, 17, the corticospinal tract 18, 19 as well as the extreme capsule 20.Ĭurrently, there is striking evidence showing that both plastic changes in the auditory-related cortex (ARC) as well as altered neural network characteristics 15, 21 lead to remarkable behavioral advantages of musicians in processing a variety of speech cues manipulated in terms of voice-onset time 22, 23, 24, pitch 25, 26, 27, 28, duration 22, 23, timbre 4, 29, rhythm 30, and prosody 26, 31. However, such brain changes should not be considered as spatially isolated phenomena but rather as being part of intimately connected and mutually interacting neural networks 11, 12. ![]() In the last two decades, professional musicians have repeatedly been shown to serve as a reliable and powerful model for studying functional and structural plasticity in brain regions supporting auditory perception 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, motor control 6, 7, 8, and recently also higher cognitive functions 9, 10. Since no between-group differences were observed in a passive listening control condition nor during rest, results point to a task-specific intertwining between musical expertise, functional connectivity, and word learning. This behavioral superiority was paralleled by increased left-hemispheric theta coherence in the dorsal stream, whereas non-musicians showed stronger functional connectivity in the right hemisphere. Behavioral results demonstrated that musicians outperformed non-musicians, as reflected by a higher sensitivity index (d’). In the present source-based EEG study, we evaluated functional connectivity between the IP lobe and Broca’s area while musicians and non-musicians learned pseudowords presented in the form of concatenated auditory streams. The ventral stream is involved in mapping sensory and phonological information onto lexical-semantic representations, whereas the dorsal stream contributes to sound-to-motor mapping, articulation, complex sequencing in the verbal domain, and to how verbal information is encoded, stored, and rehearsed from memory. Word learning constitutes a human faculty which is dependent upon two anatomically distinct processing streams projecting from posterior superior temporal (pST) and inferior parietal (IP) brain regions toward the prefrontal cortex (dorsal stream) and the temporal pole (ventral stream).
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