Title
Musical Sophistication and Multilingualism: Effects on Arcuate Fasciculus Characteristics
Author
Sarah N. Kraeutner
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia
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Abstract
The processing of auditory stimuli which are structured in time is thought to involve the arcuate fasciculus, the white matter tract which connects the temporal cortex and the inferior frontal gyrus. Research has indicated effects of both musical and language experience on the structural characteristics of the arcuate fasciculus. Here, we investigated in a sample of n = 84 young adults whether continuous conceptualizations of musical and multilingual experience related to structural characteristics of the arcuate fasciculus, measured using diffusion tensor imaging. Probabilistic tractography was used to identify the dorsal and ventral parts of the white matter tract. Linear regressions indicated that different aspects of musical sophistication related to the arcuate fasciculus' volume (emotional engagement with music), volumetric asymmetry (musical training and music perceptual abilities), and fractional anisotropy (music perceptual abilities). Our conceptualization of multilingual experience, accounting for participants' proficiency in reading, writing, understanding, and speaking different languages, was not related to the structural characteristics of the arcuate fasciculus. We discuss our results in the context of other research on hemispheric specializations and a dual-stream model of auditory processing.
Keywords
arcuate fasciculusauditory processingDTImultilingualismmusical sophistication
Object type
Language
English [eng]
Persistent identifier
https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:2112580
Appeared in
Title
Human Brain Mapping
Volume
45
Issue
14
ISSN
1065-9471
Issued
2024
Publisher
Wiley
Date issued
2024
Access rights
Rights statement
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