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Brief Communication

Nature Neuroscience 10, 420–422 (1 April 2007) | doi:10.1038/nn1872

Musical experience shapes human brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch patterns

Patrick C M Wong , Erika Skoe , Nicole M Russo , Tasha Dees & Nina Kraus

Music and speech are very cognitively demanding auditory phenomena generally attributed to cortical rather than subcortical circuitry. We examined brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch and found that musicians show more robust and faithful encoding compared with nonmusicians.