combination in poetry (‘Come what come may/Hours and time run/Through the roughest
day’, Shakespeare), and the telling of stories. Language is also necessary for expression of
rational thought and organization of human societies. It may well have evolved from the
need for social bonding between individuals belonging to the same group.^2 Language also
permits projections into the past and into the future and is necessary for the transmission
of knowledge.^3 While these characteristics, among others, make language specific to Homo
sapiens, they also seem to contribute to the splendid isolation of the linguistic function
among the other human cognitive activities. Largely because of the enormous impact in
the cognitive sciences of the generative grammar theory, developed by Chomsky,^4 language
is most often considered as relying on specific cognitive principles. Bickerton,^5 for instance,
argues that the principles that govern language ‘seem to be specifically adapted for language
and have little in common with general principles of thought or other apparatuses that
might be attributable to the human mind’ (p. 158). The specificity of the computations
involved in language processing is the main question that we would like to address in this
chapter. To try to delineate which computations are specific to language and which rely on
more general cognitive principles, if any, we chose to compare language with another well-
organized cognitive function that, although very different in many respects, nevertheless
presents interesting similarities with language: music.
We start by reviewing some of the evidence in favour of the similarities and differences
between language and music, based, first, on an evolutionary perspective, and second, on a
cognitive perspective. We then report a series of experiments directly aimed at comparing
different aspects of language and music processing.
Similarities and differences between language and music
Evolutionary perspective
While discussions on the origin of language were banished from the Société de Linguistiqueof
Paris in 1866, and although the question of the anthropological foundations of language and
music certainly remains difficult, there is renewed interest in evolutionary linguistics and
musicology, as can be seen, for instance, from the recent and provocative book edited by
Wallin et al.,^6 The Origins of Music. The question of a common or separate origin of language
and music, which was at the centre of hot debates between philosophers and scientists from
the seventeenth to the nineteenth century,7–10is now being examined using new tools and
technologies. In our opinion, one of the most promising avenues is functional brain imaging.
By offering an excellent spatial and/or temporal resolution, brain imaging methods allow us
to examine the brain regions that are activated by different aspects of information processing
and how these processes unfold in time. Even if such methods may not help solve the prob-
lem of the common or separate origin of language and music, they provide invaluable infor-
mation on the question of the similarities and differences between these two systems. Before
reviewing some of the relevant brain imaging data, let us quickly consider how ideas on the
origin of language and music have evolved throughout the centuries.
‘The old masters’ Rousseau^9 was a strong advocate of the view that music and language
share some common ancestor and that language evolved out of music for the sake of a
270