Eye movement patterns during the processing of musical and linguistic syntactic incongruities.

Abstract

It has been suggested that music and language share syntax-supporting brain mechanisms. Consequently, violations of syntax in either domain may have similar effects. The present study examined the effects of syntactic incongruities on eye movements and reading time in both music and language domains. In the music notation condition, the syntactic incongruities violated the prevailing musical tonality (i.e., the last bar of the incongruent sequence was a nontonic chord or nontonic note in the given key). In the linguistic condition, syntactic incongruities violated the expected grammatical structure (i.e., sentences with anomalies carrying the progressive -ing affix or the past tense inflection). Eighteen pianists were asked to sight-read and play musical phrases (music condition) and read sentences aloud (linguistic condition). Syntactic incongruities in both domains were associated with an increase in the mean proportion and duration of fixations in the target region of interest, as well as longer reading duration. The results are consistent with the growing evidence of a shared network of neural structures for syntactic processing, while not ruling out the possibility of independent networks for each domain.

Incremental comprehension of pitch relationships in written music: Evidence from eye movements

“…In sum, neither of the previous studies investigating pitch anomalies during music reading (Ahken et al, 2012;Penttinen et al, 2014) indicate whether contextual pitch relationships are processed online when reading a novel melody. The possibility that contextual pitch relationships are not processed online is further supported by the findings of a study using a pattern-matching paradigm (involving sequential presentation of two excerpts of notation that were either the same or different) to investigate the processing of simple versus complex pitch relationships over repeated presentations (Waters & Underwood, 1998).…”

“…These differences ranged from 0.36 to 1.5 ( M = 0.93, congruent M = 4.59, anomalous M = 3.80). They were relatively small because of the need to avoid accidentals in the target bar (which would have led to a visual confound between conditions as in Ahken et al, 2012). The target was positioned in the fourth, fifth, sixth, or seventh bar.…”

“…Another previous study of musical content investigated the effect of anomalies in novel pieces during music reading and tracked pianists' eye movements while they read musical notation and sentence stimuli (Ahken, Comeau, Hébert, & Balasubramaniam, 2012). Half of the musical stimuli were presented with key signatures and half with accidentals.…”

Handling of incongruences in music notation during singing or playing

“…Scholars interested in how experienced participants read incongruent music scores have differed on whether they apply familiar or unfamiliar music pieces or probes, into which the incongruences were inserted. The first line of research investigated how musicians process incongruent changes in unfamiliar notation (Ahken et al, 2012; Hadley et al, 2018). Ahken et al (2012) explored how pianists sight-read musical phrases containing incongruences that violated the musical tonality.…”

“…The first line of research investigated how musicians process incongruent changes in unfamiliar notation (Ahken et al, 2012; Hadley et al, 2018). Ahken et al (2012) explored how pianists sight-read musical phrases containing incongruences that violated the musical tonality. The study (Ahken et al, 2012) provided evidence that these kind of incongruences might cause changes in eye-movement behavior, such as an increase in mean proportion and duration of fixations.…”