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Tension is one of the core principles of emotion evoked by music, linking objective musical events and subjective experience. The present study used continuous behavioral rating and electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the dynamic process of tension generation and its underlying neurocognitive mechanisms; specifically, tension induced by structural violations at different music hierarchical levels. In the experiment, twenty-four musicians were required to rate felt tension continuously in real-time, while listening to music sequences with either well-formed structure, phrase violations, or period violations. The behavioral data showed that structural violations gave rise to increasing and accumulating tension experience as the music unfolded; tension was increased dramatically by structural violations. Correspondingly, structural violations elicited N5 at GFP peaks, and induced decreasing neural oscillations power in the alpha frequency band (8-13 Hz). Furthermore, compared to phrase violations, period violations elicited larger N5 and induced a longer-lasting decrease of power in the alpha band, suggesting a hierarchical manner of musical processing. These results demonstrate the important role of musical structure in the generation of the experience of tension, providing support to the dynamic view of musical emotion and the hierarchical manner of tension processing.

In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated whether and how a comma influences the reading of Chinese sentences comprised of different types of syntactic constituent such as word, phrase and clause. Participants read Chinese sentences that did or did not insert a comma at the end of a syntactic constituent. The results showed that the fixation times were shorter for the target word followed by a comma than for that followed by no comma, which suggests that a comma facilitated word identification during the reading of Chinese sentences. Furthermore, the insertion of commas shortened the total fixation times in the post-target region only for the clause condition. The data are consistent with previous findings concerning the role of segmentation cues in reading, and compatible with the implicit prosody hypothesis.As a logographic writing system, Chinese provides a case of high contrast for alphabetic systems, because there are no word boundaries (spaces) between Chinese words. The basic writing unit in Chinese is a character. Chinese words can be made of one, two or three characters, although most Chinese words consist of two characters. It is sometimes difficult for Chinese readers to identify which characters compose certain words within a Chinese sentence (Hoosain, 1992;Tsai, 2001). This characteristic of Chinese raises an interesting question about whether the role of segmentation cues such as spaces or commas inserted into text in Chinese reading is similar to that in English reading. Furthermore, how do the segmentation cues influence the course of Chinese reading?A number of studies on English text have demonstrated that the spaces between words facilitate reading (Morris, Rayner & Pollatsek, 1990;Pollatsek & Rayner, 1982;Rayner, Fischer & Pollatsek, 1998). proposed that space information in written text facilitates word identification and also aids eye movement control. They found that reading rate decreased by approximately 50% when space information was not available.In languages that do not use spaces between words, the evidence about the effects of spaces for reading have tended to be