Dr Katie Overy is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Director of the Institute for Music in Human and Social Development at the University of Edinburgh. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to research, with a particular interest in music neuroscience, music pedagogy and music psychology, and an emphasis on combining knowledge from research, practice and theory. She has published over 50 papers and supervised or examined over 20 interdisciplinary PhDs and her work has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the European Commission,the Royal Society of Edinburghand Creative Scotlandamongst others.
LECTURE: Music and Language Across the Lifespan
Linguistic and musical systems rely on similar perceptual, cognitive and neural processing capacities of the human brain, including basic auditor-motor connectivity as well as memory, learning and temporal organisation. Investigating the diversity and specificity of such similarities increases our understanding of how music can support language skills during development, during ageing, and in pedagogical and therapeutic contexts. This talk will outline a selection of studies investigating the effects of different kinds of musical engagement on different kinds of language skills, in both healthy and impaired populations.