Why would Musical Training Benefit the Neural Encoding of Speech? The OPERA Hypothesis

By Aniruddh D. Patel. Front. Psychology, 2011

634 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Mounting evidence suggests that musical training benefits the neural encoding of speech. This paper offers a hypothesis specifying why such benefits occur. The “OPERA” hypothesis proposes that such benefits are driven by adaptive plasticity in speech-processing networks, and that this plasticity occurs when five conditions are met. These are: (1) Overlap: there is anatomical overlap in the brain networks that process an acoustic feature used in both music and speech (e.g., waveform periodicity, amplitude envelope), (2) Precision: music places higher demands on these shared networks than does speech, in terms of the precision of processing, (3) Emotion: the musical activities that engage this network elicit strong positive emotion, (4) Repetition: the musical activities that engage this network are frequently repeated, and (5) Attention: the musical activities that engage this network are associated with focused attention. According to the OPERA hypothesis, when these conditions are met neural plasticity drives the networks in question to function with higher precision than needed for ordinary speech communication. Yet since speech shares these networks with music, speech processing benefits. The OPERA hypothesis is used to account for the observed superior subcortical encoding of speech in musically trained individuals, and to suggest mechanisms by which musical training might improve linguistic reading abilities.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df3d0de9de697f5269f6f58b2d271becf672892d

How researchers see this paper

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. C. Moritz
2. Maryanne Wolf
3. Georgios Papadelis
4. S. Yampolsky
5. Jennifer M Thomson

Citations in the corpus

• Links between early rhythm skills, musical training, and phonological awareness (2013, positive): “Patel (2011) presented a hypothesis (OPERA) that musical training benefits speech processing through overlap in the brain networks that process music and speech acoustics, precision in that music places higher demands on precise performance than speech, emotion because musical activity elicits…”