# Prosodic Structure as a Parallel to Musical Structure **Keywords:** musical structure, prosody, prosodic structure, music perception, speech perception **Abstract:** (and potentially recursive) way. Thus, these results are not inconsistent with the idea that listeners do not normally engage in recursive processing of musical structure during typical listening. scrambled music; for most participants, this included bilateral temporal cortex and supplementary motor area. They then had participants view sentences, word lists and non-word lists. They found that the regions that were more activated by music than scrambled music did not show differential activation to each individual kind of sentence stimulus. More generally, many fMRI studies of syntax/music connections suffer from challenges in differentiating shared patterns of fMRI activation and shared underlying circuitry (see Peretz et al., 2015, for discussion). Furthermore, the evidence for interactive effects between musical and syntactic manipulations (Carrus et al., 2013; Kunert and Slevc, 2015) is complicated by evidence for interactions between musical structure and nonsyntactic linguistic variables (Perruchet and Poulin-Charronnat, 2013) and even between musical structure and non-linguistic processes (e.g., Escoffier and Tillmann, 2008). Finally, and perhaps more importantly, we argue that the evidence in favor of recursion being used in musical processing is scant. On the face of it, this may seem like a surprising claim. Composers, after all, do often include higher-level structure in their pieces; consider the rondo in many concerti (with an ABACABA structure) or variations on verse- **Authors:** [[Musical Structure]]