Syntactic processing in music and language: Effects of interrupting auditory streams with alternating timbres
Section snippets
Ethics
This study was approved by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee (ref: 5201500300).
Participants
Twenty-three students from Macquarie University participated for course credit. One participant was excluded due to a recording error, leaving 22 participants (Mage = 20 years, range: 18–24; 17 females). All were native English speakers, and 21 reported being right handed. Participants had an average of 3.89 years of private music lessons (range: 0–14), and 6.5 years of private, classroom, and
Melodies
D prime sensitivity measures showed that participants were significantly better at detecting out-of-key notes in the one-timbre condition (M = 2.79, SD = 0.45) than the three-timbre condition (M = 2.26, SD = 0.77), t(21) = 5.22, p < .001, d = 0.84, see Fig. 2. Note that no participants scored 100% for out-of-key note detection in either the one-timbre (range: 48–96%) or the three-timbre (range: 54–94%) conditions. Both the one-timbre (M = 0.62, SD = 0.37) and three-timbre (M = 0.22, SD = 0.38)
Discussion
The current ERP experiment investigated whether behavioral and electrophysiological responses to syntactic violations in music and language were reduced when syntactic sequences were disrupted with alternating timbres (three-timbre condition) compared to when they were within one auditory stream (one-timbre condition). For melodies, behavioral data showed that participants were significantly more sensitive to syntactic violations in the one-timbre condition compared to the three-timbre
Conclusion
The current experiment shows, for the first time, that the brain response to syntactic violations in music is reduced when melodies are played by three timbres compared to one timbre. Within a music perception framework, this finding suggests that alternating timbres disrupt auditory streaming processes in an initial feature extraction stage, which in turn leads to impaired syntactic structure building processes. Although the same pattern was observed in sentence processing, the difference was
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (MQRES), awarded to the first author (allocation number 2013087), and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant (DP130101084) awarded to the second author.
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