Grouping in music and language
Jonah Katz
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003938
March 2018
This paper reviews evidence concerning the nature of grouping in music and language, and attempts to draw from this topic some general lessons about music, language, and cognition more generally. The two domains both involve correspondence between auditory discontinuities and group boundaries, reflecting the Gestalt principles of proximity and similarity, as well as a nested, hierarchical organization of constituents. There are also obvious differences between musical and linguistic grouping. Grappling with those differences requires one to think in detail about modularity, information flow, levels of description, and the functional nature of cognitive domains.