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Neuroscience and Behavioral Physiology, Vol. 36, No. 1, 2006Ontogenetic Features of the Psychophysiological Mechanisms
of Perception of the Emotional Component of Speech
in Musically Gifted ChildrenE. S. Dmitrieva, V. Ya. Gelman, K. A. Zaitseva,
and A. M. OrlovUDC 612.821Translated from Zhurnal Vysshei Nervnoi Deyatelnosti imeni I. P. Pavlova, Vol. 54, No. 5, pp. 581591,
SeptemberOctober, 2004. Original article submitted March 14, 2003, accepted September 29, 2003.The cerebral mechanisms underlying musical-artistic ability were addressed by studying psychophysical
measures of the perception of emotional information contained in speech in musically gifted children.
Studies involved 46 schoolchildren and 48 young musicians, in three age groups: 710, 1113, and
1417 years. A test sentence was presented with three emotional intonations (joy, anger, and unemotional) via headphones; subjects responses identifying the type of emotion were recorded. Dispersion
analysis revealed age and gender characteristics in the mechanisms of recognition of emotions: thus, boy
musicians led their classmates in the development of these mechanisms by 46 years, while girl musicians led by 13 years. In girls, musical training facilitated increases in the role of the left hemisphere in
processing the emotional intonation of speech, while in boys, the initially marked dominance of the left
hemisphere was not retained during further training.KEY WORDS: emotions, musical ability, psychophysical mechanisms, acoustic perception, interhemisphere relationships.Musical artistic ability is known to be a multilevel system of complex organization determined by both natural
and psychophysical factors, as well as a whole set of personality properties which develop throughout the whole of
a humans life [9, 33]. Despite the fact that the characteristics of the cerebral mechanisms underlying musical-artistic
abilities have now received extensive study, no uniformly
accepted results have been obtained.Thus, contradictory data have been obtained in relation
to which hemisphere is dominant during the perception of
musical stimuli by musicians. Some authors, using dichotic
and monaural testing, have identified predominance of the
left hemisphere during the perception of melodic stimuli in
musicians and of the right hemisphere in non-musicians
[12, 13, 22, 23, 32], while others have obtained the opposite
results [17, 25].MRI studies [31] and functional transcranial Doppler
sonographic studies [15, 24] have also identified specificity
in cerebral asymmetry in musicians. These investigations
yielded results providing evidence of the predominant
involvement of the left hemisphere of...