An ERP Study On The Synchronous Processing Of Music And Language

For a long time,the similarities between music and language have been widely discussed in linguistics and psychology.As a special syntactic form,musical syntax represents the prominence of hierarchical structure in music sequence.A number of behavioural and electrophysiological research show that syntactic processing of music and language at least partly depend on shared neural resources.Additionally,recent reports indicate that attention modulates the simultaneous processing of music and language,but the effects of attention on music and language processing are yet unclear.Meanwhile,most of the previous studies focused on the relationship between Indo-European language and music,but less on the relationship between Chinese and music.Against this background,how music interacts with language and how attention affects the synchronous processing of music and language remain to be verified from the perspective of neuropsychology.In this ERP study,a series of experiments were conducted to investigate the simultaneous processing of music and language under different attention manipulations by using visually presented sentences and auditorily presented chord sequences.Syntactically regular or irregular chords are presented synchronously with syntactically and semantically correct or incorrect words to test the interaction effect between musical syntax and linguistic syntax and semantics.The study adopting the interference paradigm was composed of two ERP experiments to investigate the neural mechanism of synchronous processing of music and sentences respectively under the music-only or language-only concerned condition.All the participants were Chinese non-musicians in the experiments.In Experiment One,a 2(regular vs.irregular music)×2(congruent vs.incongruent semantics)× 2(correct vs.incorrect syntax)three-factor within-subjects design was adopted to investigate the cognitive neural basis of synchronous processing of European tonal music and Chinese sentences in sentence-attended condition.The results showed that firstly,irregular musical syntax induced an ERAN;secondly,syntactic violation of language caused a LAN and a P600,semantic violation of language induced a N400,and combined violation of language elicited a N400 and a P600;thirdly,musical syntax interacts with the syntax and semantics of language,which was reflected by a reduced LAN and N400 at the presence of irregular music;fourthly,there was an interaction between musical syntax and combined violation of language at late time window.In Experiment Two,a 2(regular vs.irregular music)× 2(congruent vs.incongruent semantics)× 2(correct vs.incorrect syntax)three-factor within-subjects design was adopted to investigate the cognitive neural basis of synchronous processing of European tonal music and Chinese sentences in music-attended condition.The results demonstrated that firstly,in music-attended condition,irregular musical syntax elicited an ERAN and a P600;secondly,syntactic violation of language only induced a LAN without any late positivity.Besides,semantic violation of language induced a N400 and combined violation of language only induced a N400 but no late positivity;thirdly,in terms of interaction effects,musical syntax only interacts with linguistic syntax but not with linguistic semantics,yielding a reduced LAN by incorrect syntax when the relevant sentences co-occurred with irregular music and a reduced ERAN when irregular music co-occurred with incorrect syntax;fourthly,there was an interaction between musical syntax and combined violation at both early and late time windows in music-attended condition.Taken together,the results from the two experiments show that the processing of music and language is automatic in Chinese non-musicians’ brain,that is,no matter whether in sentence-attended condition or in music-attended condition,irregular musical syntax,incorrect linguistic syntax and incongruent linguistic semantics were all detected automatically.However,the allocation of attention exerts an effect on the processing of syntax in both music and language at later stages of cognitive processing and the early components was less sensitive to attention manipulation than the late components.Specifically,irregular music elicited P600 only in music-attended condition and incorrect syntax elicited P600 only in sentence-attended condition.In addition,the results confirmed the interference between musical syntax and linguistic syntax in both music-attended and sentence-attended condition.Furthermore,attention takes an impact on the interaction between musical syntax and linguistic semantics,i.e.,there was a significant interaction between musical syntax and linguistic semantics in sentence-attended condition but not in music-attended condition.The study helps clearly describe and reveal the underlying processing mechanism of music and sentences so as to enable the audience to fully understand the relationship between music and language.These findings show new supports for the neural interaction between language and music processing and fully illustrate that the allocation of attention plays an important role in the synchronous processing of music and language.On the one hand,this study extends and verifies Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis(SSIRH),which indicates the interaction between musical syntax and linguistic syntax and semantics from the perspective of neuroelectrophysiology;On the other hand,the study demonstrates that when attention is focused on different types of stimuli,music and language present different interaction effects during their synchronous processing on line.