Bachelor Student Prize Winner

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2021 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Bente Vissel

  Faculty of Science and Engineering | Bachelor University College Maastricht

"Entraining neural rhythmicity – Investigating the impact of musical expertise on neural entrainment in speech"

Bente's elevator pitch
Language and music are closely intertwined. Research in the past decades has explored how the properties of music and language affect each other, suggesting that neural activity in the processing of these stimuli overlaps. Therefore, this thesis investigated whether regularity in language, associated with rhythm in music, moderates neural entrainment to speech. Furthermore, it investigated whether musical expertise influenced this neural entrainment. The thesis was written in the first phase of the research and therefore the sample size was too small to draw significant conclusions. Nevertheless, reflecting on these results led to important implications concerning the connection in neural processing between language and music.