Facing the music: Three issues in current research on singing and aphasia

Left-hemisphere stroke patients suffering from speech and language disorders are often able to sing entire pieces of text fluently. This finding has inspired a number of music-based rehabilitation programs, most notable among them a treatment known as Melodic Intonation Therapy (Albert et al., 1973). According to the inventors of the treatment, singing should promote a transfer of language function from left frontotemporal neural networks to their preserved right-hemisphere homologues. Although singing indeed engages right frontotemporal areas (Callan et al., 2006; ？zdemir et al., 2006), it does not seem to induce a transfer of language function from the left to the right hemisphere (Belin et al., 1996; Jungblut et al., 2014). Nonetheless, several studies confirmed the promising role of singing (Mills, 1904; Gerstmann, 1964; Keith & Aronson, 1975; Tomaino, 2010) and the overall efficacy of Melodic Intonation Therapy (van der Meulen et al., 2014).