Syntactic processing in music and language: Effects of interrupting auditory streams with alternating timbres

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2018.05.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Syntactic processing of out-of-key notes was reduced for melodies with three, alternating timbres compared to one timbre.

  • Out-of-key notes were detected less in the three-timbre melodies compared to the one-timbre melodies.

  • The brain response to an out-of-key note (the early right anterior negativity) was reduced in the three-timbre condition.

  • There was no significant difference between conditions (one or three voices) in response to grammatical errors in sentences.

Abstract

Music and language both rely on the processing of spectral (pitch, timbre) and temporal (rhythm) information to create structure and meaning from incoming auditory streams. Behavioral results have shown that interrupting a melodic stream with unexpected changes in timbre leads to reduced syntactic processing. Such findings suggest that syntactic processing is conditional on successful streaming of incoming sequential information. The current study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether (1) the effect of alternating timbres on syntactic processing is reflected in a reduced brain response to syntactic violations, and (2) the phenomenon is similar for music and language. Participants listened to melodies and sentences with either one timbre (piano or one voice) or three timbres (piano, guitar, and vibraphone, or three different voices). Half the stimuli contained syntactic violations: an out-of-key note in the melodies, and a phrase-structure violation in the sentences. We found smaller ERPs to syntactic violations in music in the three-timbre compared to the one-timbre condition, reflected in a reduced early right anterior negativity (ERAN). A similar but non-significant pattern was observed for language stimuli in both the early left anterior negativity (ELAN) and the left anterior negativity (LAN) ERPs. The results suggest that disruptions to auditory streaming may interfere with syntactic processing, especially for melodic sequences.

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.

References (54)

  • Y. Mahajan et al.

    Does combing the scalp reduce scalp electrode impedances?

    J. Neurosci. Methods

    (2010)
  • N. Masataka

    The origins of language and the evolution of music: a comparative perspective

    Phys Life Rev

    (2009)
  • R.A. Miranda et al.

    Double dissociation between rules and memory in music: an event-related potential study

    NeuroImage

    (2007)
  • K. Ono et al.

    The effect of musical experience on hemispheric lateralization in musical feature processing

    Neurosci. Lett.

    (2011)
  • D. Sammler et al.

    Co-localizing linguistic and musical syntax with intracranial EEG

    NeuroImage

    (2013)
  • P. Boersma

    Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer

    Glot Int.

    (2001)
  • D.H. Brainard

    The psychophysics toolbox

    Spat. Vis.

    (1997)
  • A.S. Bregman

    Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound

    (1990)
  • S. Coulson et al.

    Expect the unexpected: event-related brain response to morphosyntactic violations

    Lang. Cogn. Process.

    (1998)
  • R. Cusack et al.

    Effects of differences in timbre on sequential grouping

    Percept. Psychophys.

    (2000)
  • R. Cusack et al.

    Effects of location, frequency region, and time course of selective attention on auditory scene analysis

    J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform.

    (2004)
  • D. Deutsch

    The Psychology of Music

    (2013)
  • N.R. Disbergen et al.

    Assessing top-down and bottom-up contributions to auditory stream segregation and integration with polyphonic music

    Front. Neurosci.

    (2018)
  • E. Fedorenko et al.

    Structural integration in language and music: evidence for a shared system

    Mem. Cogn.

    (2009)
  • A. Fiveash et al.

    Music and language: do they draw on similar syntactic working memory resources?

    Psychol. Music

    (2014)
  • Fiveash, A., McArthur, G., & Thompson, W. F. (2018). Language processing in the presence of music: An investigation of...
  • T. Gunter et al.

    Syntactic gender and semantic expectancy: ERPs reveal early autonomy and late interaction

    J. Cogn. Neurosci.

    (2000)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text