Pantev et al

• among the non-musicians, how much exposure to music they had?
• what it means for a subject to "recognize" tones?
• actual difference between absolute pitch and relative pitch?
• professional musician who had a brain tumor in his left temporal lobe which was risky for language but the neurologists and neuropsychologists were concerned that removal of it would affect his ability to play his french horn
• cut-off point of beginning to practice was age 9-10 given that the critical ages discussed in the last article were younger than that.
• early practice on just about anything can develop parts of the brain for life-long skills
• tonal languages
• if your exposd to subtle pitches over an over through out your life, you will develop tonotopically enhanced receptivity to those pitches – how does this relate to everyday life
• pure tones (how are they created)
• graphs of the article were difficult to interpret
• sn't it possible that children who are musically inclined have differences in their brains compared to children who choose to stay away from instruments?
• to improve the distraction task (so that the experimenters could better account for attention differences) would be to provide simple math test
• When the authors say that there has been a functional or cortical reorganization of brain areas, what *exactly* do they mean?
• Are there individual limitations to this plasticity?

Harrison et al

• Difference between "critical period" and an "age-related plasticity effect"
• I was intrigued by the analysis used in Study 2 (binary partitioning analysis); again, I had never heard of it & it seemed like a useful method to study optimal functioning.
• nonlinguistic benefits were mentioned in the reading, specifically improvements in quality of life
• whether among deaf children there are ways in which neural networks develop stronger or new connections in order to “compensate” for the inability to hear
• computer training tools (Fast ForWord) to improve auditory processing and language
• giving an alternative to being a member of the deaf community
• then this wouldn't actually represent the best time to "install" an implant, but rather the end of the critical period (if one existed). Right? If so, then it seems like since the end of the critical period doesn't exist (because it varies by test), this lead the authors to say that there is no critical period. But couldn't one still say that there is an optimal period?
• depending on the assessment tools used, the resulting outcomes will be different.
• the selection of outcome variables, and thus the operationalization of auditory system. It could be speculated, as the authors have alluded, that different aspects of auditory learning have different critical/sensitive periods.

· It might be more helpful to know how they look relative to others with a similar diagnosis. – delay in reading abilities

• how far these children have come in terms of using sign language?
• Deaf culture
• 50,000 channels compared with 20??
• when using cochlear implants in adults who have had many years of hearing, the implants would have to closely match the "sound precepts" the person was familiar with. – what does this mean?
• how long cochlear implants last once implanted?