Cognitive Science 41 (2017, Suppl.

2) 303–320
Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN: 0364-0213 print / 1551-6709 online
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.12411

Exploring Cognitive Relations Between Prediction in

Language and Music
Aniruddh D. Patel,a,b Emily Morgana
a
Department of Psychology, Tufts University
b
Azrieli Program in Brain, Mind, & Consciousness, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR),
Toronto
Received 28 September 2015; received in revised form 5 June 2016; accepted 14 June 2016

Abstract
The online processing of both music and language involves making predictions about upcoming
material, but the relationship between prediction in these two domains is not well understood.
Electrophysiological methods for studying individual differences in prediction in language process-
ing have opened the door to new questions. Specifically, we ask whether individuals with musical
training predict upcoming linguistic material more strongly and/or more accurately than non-musi-
cians. We propose two reasons why prediction in these two domains might be linked: (a) Musi-
cians may have greater verbal short-term/working memory; (b) music may specifically reward
predictions based on hierarchical structure. We provide suggestions as to how to expand upon
recent work on individual differences in language processing to test these hypotheses.

Keywords: Music; Language; Prediction; ERP; Individual differences

1. Introduction

In 1983, Lerdahl and Jackendoff published A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, an

influential book which helped launch the modern era of research on cognitive relations
between music and language. Such relations have proven to be fertile ground for explo-
ration (Arbib, 2013; Patel, 2008). Empirical studies in this area have implications for fun-
damental issues in cognitive science (such as modularity), for research on the
evolutionary origins of language and music, and for practical concerns such as the effi-
cacy of music-oriented therapies for individuals with language disorders (e.g., Bregman,
Patel, & Gentner, 2016; Flaugnacco et al., 2015; Koelsch, Gunter, Wittfoth, & Sammler,

Correspondence should be sent to Aniruddh D. Patel, Department of Psychology, Tufts University, 490
Boston Ave, Medford, MA 02155. E-mail: a.patel@tufts.edu
304 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017)

2005; Kunert, Willems, Casasanto, Patel, & Hagoort, 2015; Kunert, Willems, & Hagoort,
2016; Patel, 2003, 2013; Wan, Zheng, Marchina, Norton, & Schlaug, 2014; for recent
debate see Kunert & Slevc, 2015; Peretz, Vuvan, Lagrois, & Armony, 2015; Tillmann &
Bigand, 2015). Even though the volume of music-language cognitive research is rapidly
expanding, one area that remains surprisingly understudied is cognitive relations between
prediction in the two domains. This may be because it is only relatively recently that pre-
diction has become a prominent topic within psycholinguistics (e.g., Altmann & Kamide,
1999; DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, 2005; Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Levy, 2008; Van Ber-
kum, Brown, Zwitserlood, Kooijman, & Hagoort, 2005; Van Petten & Luka, 2012). In
contrast, prediction or expectancy has long been a prominent topic in the study of music
perception, where it has been linked to music’s ability to arouse emotion (Huron, 2006;
Jackendoff, 1992, Ch. 7; Meyer, 1956). Thus, prediction has largely been studied inde-
pendently in the two domains.
Given that prediction is now an important theme in research on how people compre-
hend both language and music, the comparative study of prediction seems timely. Such
research also gains impetus from the larger interest in the “predictive brain” hypothesis
within cognitive science, whereby prediction and error correction provide fundamental
principles for understanding the operations of the brain (Clark, 2013; Friston, 2009; Seth,
2013).
An interesting and important observation from neural studies of language processing is
that people vary in how strongly they predict upcoming information during sentence com-
prehension. Example evidence for this is presented below. For now, the important point
is that this variation provides one way to study relations between musical and linguistic
prediction. Specifically, using neural methods, one can ask: “Do musically trained indi-
viduals predict upcoming linguistic information more strongly and/or more accurately
than musically untrained individuals?”
Over the past decade or so, evidence has accrued that musically trained individuals
show enhancements in a variety of aspects of language processing, including the phono-
logical, prosodic, and affective aspects of language (e.g., Chobert, Francßois, Velay, &
Besson, 2014; Moreno et al., 2009; Thompson, Schellenberg, & Husain, 2004). There is
thus ample precedent for and reason to compare musically trained versus untrained people
in terms of how they process language (cf. Patel, 2014). Furthermore, there is suggestive
evidence that musically trained children form stronger predictions about upcoming lin-
guistic information in sentences. Jentschke and Koelsch (2009) showed that musically
trained 10–11 year olds showed an enhanced event-related potential (ERP) marker of lin-
guistic processing compared to musically untrained children. This marker was the early
left anterior negativity (ELAN), which has been argued to reflect violations of syntactic
predictions about sequence structure (Lau, Stroud, Plesch, & Phillips, 2006). However,
the authors also found that age was an important covariate in predicting ELAN amplitude
in their study, and point out that the ELAN differences between musician and non-musi-
cian children could reflect differences in speed of development, with non-musician chil-
dren developing the underlying cognitive mechanisms more slowly (and thus potentially
reaching the same end state as the musician children at an older age). In other words, it
 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017) 305

is unclear if the neural differences seen in this study would last into adulthood. Thus, the
comparative study of linguistic prediction in musically trained versus untrained individu-
als clearly merits further investigation. The issue which occupies the bulk of this paper is
to explain why one might expect musical training to be associated with enhanced predic-
tion tendencies in language.
Throughout this paper, we focus on predicting what is coming next in a sentence (e.g.,
which word or syntactic constituent), as this has been the primary focus of research on
linguistic prediction. Similarly, when discussing prediction in music, we will be con-
cerned about what pitch (or chord) is coming next, not with rhythmic prediction. We do
not deal with associations between musical training and prediction of phonological or
prosodic structure, or of timing/rhythm in sentences, though we feel that this is a promis-
ing topic for future research (see especially Brown, Salverda, Dilley, & Tanenhaus, 2011,
2015; cf. Magne, Jordan, & Gordon, 2016; Schmidt-Kassow & Kotz, 2009; Vuust, Oster-
gaard, Pallesen, Bailey, & Roepstorff, 2009). We also emphasize that our paper is theo-
retical in nature. We do not present new data, and focus on providing a framework for
research on relations between linguistic and musical prediction. Thus, we take up the
challenge posed by Jackendoff’s (2015) paper “In Defense of Theory,” published in this
issue.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: First, we present neural evidence
for individual differences in linguistic prediction, which comes from ERP research on
sentence processing. Second, we discuss how language and music processing both likely
involve making predictions at different levels of structure. Third, we discuss two reasons
why musical training might be associated with enhanced prediction tendencies in lan-
guage. Fourth, we raise two questions that would arise if it were found that musicians do
predict language more strongly or accurately than non-musicians: (a) What would be the
functional significance of this for language processing? and (b) How specific would this
strengthened prediction be to language, versus to any task that involves predicting how
events unfold over time?
We note that our paper does not address issues of causality. That is, we are not con-
cerned whether musical training causes changes in linguistic prediction tendencies,
though this is certainly an interesting question (cf. Patel, 2014). Rather, our goal is to
provide one framework that would explain why musical training would be associated
with enhanced prediction tendencies in language. If such associations are found, this
would motivate studies specifically aimed at exploring causality, that is, longitudinal
training studies with random assignment of individuals to musical versus non-musical
training, with pre- and post-training measures of linguistic prediction.

2. Neural evidence for individual differences in language prediction

Recent ERP research on sentence processing has revealed significant individual differ-
ences in the tendency to predict upcoming linguistic information (e.g., Kaan, 2014;
Wlotko, Federmeier, & Kutas, 2012). Some of these findings have relied on a specific
306 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017)

method to measure prediction in language which controls for how semantically “surpris-
ing” a word is (i.e., how well it matches conceptual features activated by the sentence
context, as indexed by the N400 ERP component) while varying the strength of a predic-
tion generated by the preceding sentence context. To illustrate this distinction, consider
the following two sentence openings:
(1) When the two met, one of them held out his _________.
(2) Sandy always wished she’d had a ___________.
Now consider what happens if the blank is filled in by the word “badge.” Cloze-prob-
ability studies show that this is an unexpected word after both stems. Crucially, however,
in sentence (1) cloze studies show that comprehenders can (and often do) form a strong
prediction for a particular word: “hand.” Thus, psycholinguistic researchers refer to sen-
tences like (1) as having “strong constraint.” In sentence (2) however, comprehenders do
not strongly predict any particular word (in a cloze study, some might say “car,” others
“house,” etc.). Thus, researchers refer to sentences like (2) as having “weak constraint.”
The key point is that the structure and content of the sentences have been designed to
modulate the strength of a comprehender’s predictions at a specific point in time. (This
approach to studying prediction has inspired a recent study of musical expectancy using a
novel “melodic cloze probability paradigm”; Fogel, Rosenberg, Lehman, Kuperberg, &
Patel, 2015.)
When the word “badge” is placed in the blank slot in sentences (1) and (2) above, and
neural responses to this target word are measured using ERPs, the size of the N400 is the
same in both sentence contexts. Presumably this is because in neither case did the prior
words activate conceptual features related to “badge.” In other words, having a strong
prediction for a different word than “badge” in the first sentence does not appear to make
lexical access to “badge” any harder when it occurs, as indexed by the N400.
Crucially, however, the neural response to “badge” in the two sentences does differ in
terms of another ERP component: In the first sentence (with strong constraint) “badge”
elicits a frontal positivity from about 500–900 ms (Federmeier, Wlotko, De Ochoa-
Dewald, & Kutas, 2007), perhaps reflecting the suppression of the predicted but not pre-
sented item (Fig. 1).
Wlotko et al. (2012) used this frontal positivity in sentences like (1) versus (2) above
to study the strength of lexical prediction tendencies in healthy older versus younger
adults. They found that, on average, younger adults showed stronger prediction tendencies
as measured by the amplitude of the frontal positivity. They also found considerable indi-
vidual variation among both younger and older individuals in the strength of prediction
tendencies, as measured by frontal positivity amplitude. Fig. 2 shows the relevant figure
from their paper, in which the size of the frontal positivity across younger participants is
shown in the top panel and the size of this same positivity across older participants is
shown by in the bottom panel, sorted by amplitude of the positivity within each group.
Note how the majority of younger adults show a positivity as a consequence of unfulfilled
predictions (i.e., black boxes >0 mV on the y axis), whereas the ERP pattern for older
adults is centered around 0 mV, with only about ¼ of older showing a positive value
 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017) 307

Fig. 1. ERPs to different target words at ends of sentence stems with strong or weak constraint, from left
and right prefrontal electrodes (0 ms indicates the onset of the target word). By convention, ERP traces are
plotted with negative values upward and positive values downward. Note that the amplitude and latency of
the peak around 400 ms (the N400) is similar for “badge” in the two sentences (solid purple and dotted blue
traces). However, “badge” in the strong constraint sentence elicits a more positive-going waveform starting
around 500 ms (red box: solid purple line substantially more positive than the dotted blue line). After Feder-
meier et al. (2007).

>1mV. Wlotko et al. (2012) take these data to suggest that older adults exhibit a
decreased reliance on predictive mechanisms in sentence comprehension.
Using methods and measures akin those of Wlotko et al. (2012), one could measure
prediction tendencies in musically trained versus untrained individuals of similar ages. As
in Wlotko et al. (2012), this can be done without the need for a secondary task (such as
acceptability judgments), which can influence cognitive processing. Using the ERP para-
digm, participants can simply be asked to read or listen to sentences attentively, with
occasional probes for comprehension. Another advantage is that the paradigm does not
rely on the use of frank lexical anomalies, which could trigger general error processing
mechanisms non-specific to language (LaCroix, Diaz, & Rogalsky, 2015; Rogalsky, Rong,
Saberi, & Hickok, 2011).

3. Language and music processing involve predictions at multiple levels

When comprehenders make predictions in language or music processing, what are they
predicting? Both language and music processing likely involve making predictions across
different levels of structure. While many experiments on prediction in language process-
ing, such as those discussed above (Federmeier et al., 2007; Wlotko et al., 2012; see also
308 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017)

Fig. 2. Amplitude (in lV) of the frontal positivity (black squares) to plausible but unexpected words in
strongly constraining sentences, across normal younger and older adults (within each group, individual data
have been sorted in order of ascending amplitude). The amplitude of this positivity is computed as the ampli-
tude difference between a plausible but unexpected word in a strongly versus weakly constraining sentence
(cf. Fig. 1). (In the legend in the upper right of the figure, SCU WCU means “strongly constraining unex-
pected minus strongly constraining unexpected.”)
 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017) 309

DeLong et al., 2005; Van Berkum et al., 2005) have focused on prediction of individual
words on the basis of the semantic context, there is good evidence that language process-
ing involves prediction across all levels of linguistic structure—including prediction both
of word-level lexico-semantic information and of hierarchical syntactic structure (see
reviews by Delong, Troyer, & Kutas, 2014; Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016) For example,
much like Federmeier et al. (2007) manipulated the expectation for a specific word, Lau
et al. (2006) manipulated the expectation for a word category. In sentence (3), the geni-
tive (Dana’s) creates a strong expectation for a noun to follow. But in sentence (4), the
inclusion of a previous genitive (Mary’s) allows for a possible ellipsis, such that the
expectation for a noun following Dana’s is weakened (i.e., since (4) would be grammati-
cal if it ended at the word Dana’s):
(3) Although the bridesmaid kissed Mary, she did not kiss Dana’s. . .
(4) Although Erica kissed Mary’s mother, she did not kiss Dana’s. . .
When these fragments were continued with an unexpected and ungrammatical word
category (e.g., a preposition such as of), Lau et al. found that the violation yielded a lar-
ger ELAN in the condition with a stronger category constraint (3). Given that a preposi-
tion is equally ungrammatical in both cases, the larger ELAN in the strong constraint
condition suggests that this component reflects not just a grammaticality violation but
more specifically the violation of the strong prediction for a particular word category.
That prediction in language processing should span multiple levels of linguistic struc-
ture fits naturally within an emerging view of language representation that avoids drawing
a sharp distinction between the lexicon and the grammar. For example, Jackendoff’s Par-
allel Architecture, like Goldberg’s (2003) Construction Grammar, proposes that a single
storage system includes both words and grammatical constructions, as well as in-between
cases such as idioms (kick the bucket) and expressions with open slots (take NP for
granted; see Jackendoff, 2015, for a recent exposition). This theory of language represen-
tation has garnered increasing empirical support in recent years (e.g., Arnon & Cohen
Priva, 2013; Arnon & Snider, 2010; Bybee, 2006; Morgan, 2016) and is additionally sup-
ported by state-of-the-art computational models of language representation and processing
(Bod, Scha, & Sima’an, 2003; Johnson, Griffiths, & Goldwater, 2007; O’Donnell, 2015;
Pierrehumbert, 2000; Post & Gildea, 2013). If, as these theories suggest, a unified combi-
natorial system applies across levels of linguistic representation, then the predictive mech-
anisms that apply to lexico-semantic information for individual words would naturally be
predicted to apply to syntactic or other hierarchical structure as well. Nonetheless, the dif-
ferent ERP signatures seen in response to violations of different types of constraint (e.g.,
a late positivity in Federmeier et al., 2007, vs. an early negativity in Lau et al., 2006) do
suggest that multiple neural mechanisms are at play in the predictions made in language
processing. In sum, while there remain many open questions regarding the mechanisms
underlying prediction in language processing, it seems safe to assume both that predic-
tions are made across different levels of structure, but also that these levels are to some
extent neurally dissociable.1
310 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017)

Music, like language, also involves predictions over multiple levels of structure, for
example, melody, harmony, and rhythm (e.g., Patel & Iversen, 2014; Schellenberg, 1996;
Tillmann, 2012). Focusing on the prediction on what pitch or chord is coming next, there
is debate over the degree to which prediction involves “linear” relations, that is, local
transitions between successive tones, versus hierarchical relations, that is relations
between tones based on higher-level structural relations in a sequence, including relations
between tones or chords which are not immediately adjacent in the musical surface (see
Bigand, Delbe, Poulin-Charronnat, Leman, & Tillmann, 2014; Collins, Tillmann, Barrett,
Delbe, & Janata, 2014; Krumhansl, 2015, for recent discussions). Currently, the most
prominent computational model of melodic expectancy is an information-theoretic model
called IDyOM (for “Information Dynamics of Music,” Pearce, 2005; Pearce & Wiggins,
2006). This model is based on the theory that listeners acquire their melodic expectations
via implicit statistical learning of note-to-note transition probabilities in music. This
strongly bottom-up model is trained on a large corpus of tonal melodies, and computes
melodic expectancy as the probability of different possible continuations of a melodic
opening based on the frequency with which different continuations have followed a simi-
lar context in the model’s training corpus. The model has performed well in multiple
behavioral and neural studies of melodic expectation (e.g., Egermann, Pearce, Wiggins,
& McAdams, 2013; Omigie, Pearce, Williamson, & Stewart, 2013; Pearce, Ruiz, Kapasi,
Wiggins, & Bhattacharya, 2010). However, because the model focuses on note-to-note
transition probabilities (typically focusing on just several notes prior to the target note), it
does not explicitly capture larger-scale hierarchical relationships in music, such as under-
lying chordal/harmonic patterns.
There are good reasons, however, to consider the possibility that hierarchical structure
plays a role in prediction in music. Cognitive theories of how listeners apprehend Wes-
tern tonal music often include a prominent role for hierarchical structure (e.g., Lerdahl &
Jackendoff, 1983; Rohrmeier, 2011). One example of a hierarchical representation of a
melody, focusing on the relative structural importance of different pitches, is shown in
Fig. 3, using a phrase from the Beatles’ song “Norwegian Wood” (from Jackendoff &
Lerdahl, 2006).
Importantly, empirical work using both behavioral (e.g., Lerdahl & Krumhansl, 2007)
and neural (e.g., Koelsch, Rohrmeier, Torrecuso, & Jentschke, 2013) methods has pro-
vided evidence that hierarchical structure plays a role in how listeners perceive Western
tonal music. Of course, this does not imply that the hierarchical structures involved in
music cognition are identical to those involved in language processing. For example,
referring to “pitch reduction” trees such as those in Fig. 3 above, Jackendoff (2009)
notes: “[Pitch reduction] structure, like [linguistic] syntax, is a recursive headed hierar-
chy, in which each constituent has a head, and other dependents are modifiers or elabora-
tions of the head. But in other respects the two structures diverge. [Pitch reduction]
structure has no parts of speech: the tonic/dominant distinction, for instance, is not for-
mally analogous to either noun/verb or subject/predicate/object” (p. 201). Thus, the mind
may generate somewhat different hierarchical structures when comprehending music and
language. For the current purposes, however, the key point is that in both domains the
 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017) 311

Fig. 3. Tree representation of the hierarchical structure of pitches in the first phrase of “Norwegian Wood,”
(from Jackendoff & Lerdahl, 2006). Longer branches terminate on structurally more important notes, while
shorter branches terminate on more “ornamental” (less structurally important) pitches. According to this anal-
ysis, the structurally most important pitches in this phrase are on “I,” “girl,” “say,” and “me.”

mind can parse a linear sequence of events in terms of rich hierarchical structures.
Indeed, a tendency to parse complex sequences in this way may be a distinctively human
trait, reflecting neural specializations acquired through evolution (cf. Fitch, 2014).

4. Reasons why musical training might be associated with enhanced prediction

tendencies in language

For those interested in testing whether musicians have stronger linguistic prediction
tendencies than non-musicians, a key question is why one might expect this to obtain in
the first place. Here, we suggest two possible reasons why musical training may be asso-
ciated with strengthened linguistic prediction.
First, musical training has been associated with enhanced verbal short-term memory
(Hansen, Wallentin, & Vuust, 2013; Wallentin, Nielsen, Friis-Olivarius, Vuust, & Vuust,
2010), and verbal working memory (Clayton et al., 2016; Franklin et al., 2008; Zuk, Ben-
jamin, Kenyon, & Gaab, 2014), where the latter involves not just short-term storage of
information, but manipulation of that information. For example, Franklin et al. (2008)
found musicians did better than non-musicians in an operation span task, which uses a
dual-task methodology to load both storage and executive processing aspects of memory,
while Zuk et al. (2014) and Clayton et al. (2016) found that musicians outperformed non-
musicians in a backward digit span task. It is important to note, however, that there are
some inconsistencies in the research literature, and not all studies find musician advan-
tages in verbal short-term or working memory tasks (e.g., Benassi-Werke, Queiroz, Ara-
ujo, Bueno, & Oliveira, 2012). These discrepancies may be due to differences in
methodological details or in participant characteristics, and further research is needed to
investigate the reliability of the musician advantage on these tasks. However, it is not
implausible that such an advantage could exist: There is neuroimaging evidence for some
312 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017)

overlap in cortical regions involved in verbal and tonal working memory (Schulze, Zys-
set, Mueller, Friederici, & Koelsch, 2011), and musical training may strengthen (or prese-
lect for capacious) auditory working memory, since musicians must listen to and
reproduce long sequences of tones as part of learning to play melodies (cf. Patel, 2014).
More to the point for the current discussion, enhanced verbal short-term/working memory
could influence linguistic prediction tendencies, because it would make more material
available in memory from which to make local word-to-word associations or from which
to build hierarchical structures (Boudewyn, Long, & Swaab, 2013; Just & Carpenter,
1992; Nakano, Saron, & Swaab, 2010; Traxler, Williams, Blozis, & Morris, 2005; Van
Petten, Weckerly, McIsaac, & Kutas, 1997). One way to test for a link between musician-
ship, verbal memory abilities, and linguistic prediction tendencies would be to conduct a
study like that of Wlotko et al. (2012) on musicians and non-musicians, while also col-
lecting measures of verbal short term/working memory from participants. If differences in
linguistic prediction tendencies are found between groups, one could then determine the
extent to which they could be explained by differences in verbal short-term/working
memory capacity.
Independent of possible differences in verbal memory, there is a second reason why
musical training might be associated with enhanced linguistic prediction tendencies. This
is because music perception is likely to encourage predictions based on the hierarchical
structure of sequences. Why might this be the case? First, music perception is likely to
encourage predictions based any sort of sequence structure, because prediction in music
is linked to emotion. Decades of theory and research in music cognition suggest that the
violation or fulfillment of predictions plays an important role in generating a listener’s
emotional response to music (e.g., Huron, 2006; Meyer, 1956; Salimpoor, Zald, Zatorre,
Dagher, & McIntosh, 2015; Steinbeis, Koelsch, & Sloboda, 2006). Thus, those who are
drawn to musical training because of their emotional response to music may have a
strong tendency to make predictions about sequence structure (and/or musical training
may sharpen these tendencies). In addition to this general way in which music processing
promotes prediction, there is a more specific way in which it may promote prediction
based on the hierarchical structure of sequences. Music, unlike language, contains a great
deal of repetition: motives, phrases, and themes are repeated extensively within a passage,
often with some small variations (e.g., transposition up or down with small changes in
pitch intervals and/or note durations, as in the famous opening two phrases of Beetho-
ven’s Fifth Symphony). This extensive repetition is thought to have numerous cognitive
consequences (Margulis, 2014; Narmour, 1990). One proposed consequence is that the
listener’s attention is drawn to higher levels of structure (cf. Margulis, 2012), which then
strengthens expectancies operating on these higher levels. Initial studies have provided
support for this idea (Krumhansl, 1997), though further tests are certainly needed. Should
this finding hold, it could explain why musically trained individuals rely more strongly
than musically untrained individuals on the hierarchical structure of sequences when pre-
dicting what is coming next. (For empirical evidence that musical training is associated
with stronger predictions based on the underlying harmonic structure of sequences, see
Fogel et al., 2015; Koelsch, Schmidt, & Kansok, 2002.) The key question, then, is
 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017) 313

whether this enhanced reliance on hierarchical structure when making predictions trans-
fers to language processing. As noted above, music and language both have rich hierar-
chical structures, though the details of those structures are different. Nevertheless, it is
possible that the general tendency to form predictions based on hierarchical structure
would be carried across domains (cf. Van de Cavey & Hartsuiker, 2016). This could
potentially influence how much people rely on predictions based on hierarchical structure
in language.
If differences between musically trained and untrained individuals lie in their hierarchi-
cal processing, an experiment like that of Wlotko et al. (2012) might not reveal this dif-
ference, as the stimuli used in their paradigm depended largely on semantic associations,
and there is no evidence that semantic processing varies with musical training. Instead, to
test for differences in reliance on hierarchical structure in making predictions, one would
want to test stimuli wherein predictions crucially rely upon the higher-level structure of
the sentence. For example, (5) and (6) differ minimally in their lexical content, but the
difference in their syntactic structures leads to different thematic role assignments and
hence to radically different predictions about what words or types of words are likely to
complete each sentence:
(5) The man bit the _________.
(6) The man was bitten by the _________.
Although the structures of these sentences point to different completions (e.g., edible
things for (5), animals for (6)), comprehenders do sometimes attribute non-literal mean-
ings to utterances, particularly those with lower frequency syntactic structures such as (6)
(Ferreira & Patson, 2007; Gibson, Bergen, & Piantadosi, 2013), and hence might occa-
sionally or in part make structurally inappropriate predictions (e.g., predicting something
edible even in (6)). If musicians are specifically better are making hierarchical predic-
tions than non-musicians, we would expect to see that musicians more strongly differenti-
ate between the types of words they predict to complete each sentence; that is, they
should be less likely to be misled by predictions that would apply only to the other struc-
ture.

5. If musicians predict language more strongly than non-musicians, what else would
we want to know?

In this final section of our paper, we address two questions that would arise if it were
found that musicians show stronger linguistic prediction than non-musicians. The first
question concerns the functional significance of such a finding. What real-word benefits
(if any) might be associated with predicting language more strongly or accurately? One
possibility is that an individual who is better at predicting upcoming words in sentences
may be a more efficient reader, because accessing and integrating each upcoming word
into its context should be easier compared to the case where predictions had not been
made (Kuperberg, 2013). In this light, it is interesting to note that numerous studies
314 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017)

report an association between music training and linguistic reading abilities in children
(e.g., Forgeard et al., 2008; Lamb & Gregory, 1993). Currently there is interest in the
idea that links between musical and reading skills are mediated via auditory mechanisms
shared by musical and phonological processing (e.g., Flaugnacco et al., 2015), but
another possible pathway for a music-reading link could be via relations between musical
training and linguistic prediction abilities (cf. Francßois & Sch€on, 2014). Another possible
real-world benefit of enhanced linguistic prediction could be an enhanced ability to under-
stand speech when it is acoustically degraded, for example, when sentences occur in the
presence of other intelligible sentences, as often happens in real-world settings (e.g., con-
versing in a crowded room). Recent research has revealed substantial benefits for musi-
cians in a “cocktail party problem” task where a target sentence must be understood
when presented concurrently with other sentences coming from different spatial locations
(Swaminathan et al., 2015; cf. Basßkent & Gaudrain, 2016). This benefit is not just due to
better sensory processing of sound: It appears that cognitive factors, including enhanced
auditory working memory, play a role in this advantage (Clayton et al., 2016). Associa-
tions between linguistic prediction abilities and success in solving the cocktail party prob-
lem have not yet been examined, but such research would be motivated by the finding
that musicians predict language more strongly or accurately than non-musicians.
The second question that would arise if musicians predict language more strongly than
non-musicians concerns the specificity of the relationship to language processing (cf.
Jackendoff, 2009). Would one find, for example, that musicians were better predictors for
any sort of sequential pattern that unfolds rapidly in time, or perhaps for any sequential
patterns with hierarchical structure? The answer to this question is relevant to the basic
question of how prediction is instantiated in the brain. It seems plausible that “predic-
tion,” like “memory,” is not a single entity from the standpoint of underlying brain mech-
anisms. Just as it is now widely accepted that memory has different subcomponents with
non-identical neurocognitive substrates (e.g., procedural, semantic, episodic), prediction is
likely to be an umbrella term for a set of distinct (if interacting) processes. For example,
within the domain of music processing, the mismatch negativity (MMN) and early right
anterior negativity (ERAN) are ERP components which are both thought to reflect viola-
tions of prediction. Crucially, however, they are distinct in terms of the nature of their
eliciting events: The MMN concerns deviations from local sound patterns in sensory
memory while the ERAN is a response to departures from learned structural norms (Gar-
rido, Kilner, Stephan, & Friston, 2009; Koelsch, Jentschke, Sammler, & Mietchen, 2007;
see Koelsch, 2009 for a review). These ERP components also have different underlying
neural generators, with the MMN being generated largely in auditory cortex while the
ERAN has generators in Broca’s region and its right hemisphere homolog (Koelsch,
2009, 2012; Maess, Koelsch, Gunter, & Friederici, 2001). Thus, prediction in musical
processing is obviously not just one process from the standpoint of the brain. This raises
the possibility that musicians may show stronger linguistic prediction than non-musicians,
without necessarily showing differences in other types of tasks requiring prediction. One
way to test this idea would be to compare musicians and non-musicians on non-verbal
tasks that engage prediction, for example, spatial tasks in which visual patterns unfold in
 A. D. Patel, E. Morgan / Cognitive Science 41 (2017) 315

structured ways over time, and in which prediction is needed to solve the task success-
fully (e.g., moving a cursor to a particular point on a screen to intercept a moving target,
which requires anticipatory processing). Recent research has found that musicians per-
form comparably to non-musicians on the “multiple object tracking” task, a spatial atten-
tion task which involves visually tracking multiple moving dots over time (Clayton et al.,
2016). However, it is not yet known if musicians outperform non-musicians on visuospa-
tial tasks that clearly engage predictive processing. Taking a step back, the more general
issue at hand is the cognitive specificity of predictive mechanisms shared by music and
language.

6. Conclusion

We have reviewed evidence for individual differences in the strength of tendencies to

make predictions during language processing, and we suggested two reasons why musical
training might be linked with stronger prediction tendencies in language: one involving
verbal short term/working memory, and one specifically involving predictions based on
hierarchical structure. Given the increasing interest in prediction in language and music
processing (and in cognition more generally), but the lack of research linking the two, we
propose that this is a fruitful area for future research.

Acknowledgments

We thank Ray Jackendoff for helpful discussions, Victoria Williamson for information
on verbal memory abilities in musicians and non-musicians, Eddie Wlotko for feedback,
and John Iversen, Jason Rosenberg, and Eddie Wlotko for help with figures.

Note

1. The lines along which predictions dissociate neurally may or may not correspond
to the traditional lines drawn by linguistic analysis.

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