Aniruddh D. Patel (2008). Music, language, and the brain . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xi+513.

Parallels in the sound patterns, structure and origins of language and music have fascinated intellectuals for centuries, but empirical study of connections between these two domains has only recently been undertaken in earnest.Music, language, and the brain provides a fascinating synopsis of the current, young state of scientific research in cross-domain language–music comparative study. The book traverses with ease the disciplinary lines of linguistics, music and neuroscience. This impressive work of scholarship will serve as a reference on the topic for years to come. For any linguist with a primary research interest in, or desire to understand, speech prosody, this book is a must-read. The work will also be of great interest to laboratory phonologists, regardless of their specific research area, due to its impressive synthesis of a broad base of empirical literatures across phonetics, phonology, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Linguists from any area of specialisation who wish to understand points where language and music do, and do not, intersect, will find this book useful, and it will be a tremendous resource for the student inquiring about comparative language–music topics. Finally, students stand to benefit particularly from the book, which is chock-full of outof-the-box research and dissertation ideas. The book is organised into seven chapters, which can largely be read on their own and are accessible to anyone with training in linguistics (or music). Chapter 1 lays some groundwork, for example establishing that both music and language are universals : both appear in every human society, regardless of what other aspects of culture are absent (Nettl 2000, Everett 2005). Two aspects of the book’s orientation are also laid plain. First, it focuses on the relationship between purely instrumental music and ordinary spoken language, rather than e.g. poetry. Second, the book avowedly seeks commonalities between music and language, rather than emphasising differences; nevertheless, it seems nowhere to exaggerate these shared aspects, and in some cases may actually underestimate them (see comments below). The chapters that are most directly relevant to phonology are Chapters 2 (on pitch and timbre), 3 (on rhythm) and 4 (on melody). Chapter 2 compares sound elements in music and language, focusing on the roles of pitch and timbre in each. Both speech and music are noted to be ‘particulate’ systems, in which a set of discrete elements of little inherent meaning are combined to form structures with a great diversity of meanings. The chapter highlights an important difference between the two domains, namely that timbre (cf. spectral contrast) is the primary dimension for organised sound distinctions in language (cf. phonemic contrast), whereas sequences of organised timbral contrasts are quite rare in music. Conversely, the chapter highlights a hypothesised central link between domains, namely, shared mechanisms for sound-category learning via statistical learning of acoustic exemplars, which is thought to underlie the Phonology 26 (2009) 535–540. f Cambridge University Press 2009 doi:10.1017/S0952675709990261