Both language and music consist of discrete elements organized in embedded hierarchical structures. Schön and François nicely expose in this review that musical expertise facilitates learning of both linguistic and musical structures. At the behavioral level, the musicians did not outperform the non-musicians. However, ERP analyses showed that acquisition of boundary perception (segmentation) between units improved with musical training. The experimental strategy typically used to investigate segmentation relies in a learning phase-on passive exposition to artificially constructed linguistic and musical material (cf. Figure 1). The authors plausibly argue, also based on a solid literature in this field, that such perceptual learning partially relies on statistics. The probability that a certain element is followed by another is different between and within units (words or tone sequences). In the test phase, participants should discriminate units from non-units. Statistical learning is by no means restricted to the auditory domain.
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