Abstract: Since accumulated evidences have revealed that music and language do have some relationship, this field of study has attracted more and more interest. As scientists have addressed, music and language have many features in common. They are both structured sequences which are arranged according to some rules, which is syntax. Also, they can both express meanings and emotions, which can be called semantics. Thirdly, they both have elements like pitch and rhythm. And the last, music and language are both human-unique and universal involved. To unveil the relationship of music and language, a lot of researches have been conducted to investigate the neural basis of them. Whether shared neural basis is involved in music and language has become the focus of these researches. Based on the common features of music and language, studies in this field are of 3 levels, syntax, semantics and the perception of pitch and rhythm. On the level of syntax, shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (SSIRH) was raised in 2003. It suggests that the brain regions for syntax processing can be divided into processing regions and representation regions, and music and language may share the processing regions. Comparative studies were done and most of them well supported SSIRH. In these studies, several distinctive ERP components were found such as ERAN and N500, which later became the standard indicator of music incongruousness and were applied to many comparative studies. However, SSIRH has not been proved yet. More evidences are needed to demonstrate the accurate regions and the processing mechanism in detail. On the level of semantics, researchers found that music, even single chord could elicit a very similar N400 effect to that of language in an ERP experiment. These findings suggest that music is able to convey conceptual information like language, and they probably share some semantic processing resources. Since the processing mechanism and its location in brain remain unknown, further studies are required to illuminate the relationship of music and language in semantic level. On the level of pitch and rhythm perception, available works are inferior to that of above two levels in both amount and quality. Studies on rhythm perception in music and language are especially rare due to lack of quantitative criteria with few ones implying that there’s some connection between music and language. On the other hand, studies on pitch perception are relatively more. However, most of them put emphasis on the correlation of pitch detect ability between music and language. The limited comparative studies on processing of pitch perception in music and language merely discovered the differences between them. If music and language indeed have relationship in pitch perception, more comparative studies should be undertaken to clarify not only their different but also their common neural basis. All together, this review has tried to inform the reader with researches on the relationship of music and language processing and help to establish a comprehensive map in this field.

Key words: music, language, syntax, semantics, pitch or rhythm

摘要： 音乐和语言加工神经基础的关系研究，近年来发展迅速，获得了越来越多的关注。“共享结构整合资源假说”主张音乐的句法加工和语言的句法加工具有较大程度的神经资源的共享。在听觉语言实验中反映句法违例的ERP ELAN与音乐句法违例引发的ERAN极为相似，唯一的区别仅在于它们的分布有所不同——ERAN就像是一个两半球对称的ELAN。而且ERAN的引发不受是否接受过音乐训练这一因素的影响，虽然音乐人被试引发的ERAN波幅更大。一些研究发现音乐语义加工的神经基础为N400和N500。前者可以由音乐和语言两种刺激引发，后者只能由音乐意义的加工引发。然而，音乐的音调感知和语言的音调感知是否共享了神经资源，却还没有确定的结论。

关键词: 音乐, 语言, 句法, 语义, 音调节奏