Language influences music harmony perception: effects of shared syntactic integration resources beyond attention

Abstract

Many studies have revealed shared music–language processing resources by finding an influence of music harmony manipulations on concurrent language processing. However, the nature of the shared resources has remained ambiguous. They have been argued to be syntax specific and thus due to shared syntactic integration resources. An alternative view regards them as related to general attention and, thus, not specific to syntax. The present experiments evaluated these accounts by investigating the influence of language on music. Participants were asked to provide closure judgements on harmonic sequences in order to assess the appropriateness of sequence endings. At the same time participants read syntactic garden-path sentences. Closure judgements revealed a change in harmonic processing as the result of reading a syntactically challenging word. We found no influence of an arithmetic control manipulation (experiment 1) or semantic garden-path sentences (experiment 2). Our results provide behavioural evidence for a specific influence of linguistic syntax processing on musical harmony judgements. A closer look reveals that the shared resources appear to be needed to hold a harmonic key online in some form of syntactic working memory or unification workspace related to the integration of chords and words. Overall, our results support the syntax specificity of shared music–language processing resources.

Entrainment to an auditory signal: Is attention involved?

“…In this paper, we will adopt this dominant interpretation of the DAT as describing the entrainment of general attention to a perceptual rhythm. Despite such a wide, supportive research literature, a growing number of research findings is not easily compatible with the DAT (Bauer, Jaeger, Thorne, Bendixen, & Debener, 2015;Bermeitinger & Frings, 2015;Hickok, Farahbod, & Saberi, 2015;Kunert, Willems, & Hagoort, 2016). This calls for a critical test of the theory.…”

“…It is important to test whether the DAT generalizes to a more difficult task and/or more variable stimuli. The need for such independent, conceptual replications has recently been underlined by replication problems in psychology in general (Kunert et al, 2016; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) and DAT research in particular (using a different paradigm, Bauer et al, 2015). …”

Research Of The Teenagers’ Attitude To Studying Art At School

“…Another direction in the development of interest in subjects of art is the study of the relationship between music and speech. A series of studies focused on the similarity of musical language and speech https: //doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2019.09.02.55 Corresponding Author: Veronika V. Kuznetsova Selection and peer-review under (Kunert, Willems, Casasanto, Patel, & Hagoort, 2015, Kunert, Willems, & Hagoort, 2016, the correlation between musicality and language abilities (Malzer, 2018) the effect of music classes on improving the ability to understand speech for children with dyslexia (Flaugnacco et al, 2015).…”

Using music to study the evolution of cognitive mechanisms relevant to language

“…(Henceforth in this article, music refers to instrumental music, and language refers to ordinary language, i.e., not poetry, chant, or other stylized forms). Hidden links between musical and linguistic cognition have been found at several levels of language processing, including syntactic, semantic, prosodic, phonological, and affective (e.g., Flaugnacco et al, 2015;Habib et al, 2016;Koelsch et al, 2004;Koelsch, Gunter, Wittfoth, & Sammler, 2005;Kunert, Willems, Casasanto, Patel, & Hagoort, 2015;Kunert, Willems, & Hagoort, 2016;Lima & Castro, 2011;Liu, Patel, Fourcin, & Stewart, 2010;Musso et al, 2015;Patel, Peretz, Tramo, & Labreque, 1998;Slevc, Rosenberg, & Patel, 2009;Thompson, Schellenberg, & Husain, 2004; for recent debate, see Collins, Tillmann, Barrett, Delbé, & Janata, 2014;Kunert & Slevc, 2015;Peretz, Vuvan, Lagrois, & Armony, 2015;Tillmann & Bigand 2015).…”

“…Although statistical learning may help the human mind acquire implicit knowledge of the norms of harmonic structure, evidence from behavioral and neural studies suggests that the processing of harmonic structure by adults involves hierarchical processing (e.g., Koelsch, Rohrmeier, Torrecuso, & Jentschke, 2013;Lerdahl & Krumhansl, 2007;cf. Rohrmeier, 2011), which overlaps and interacts with the processing of grammatical relationships in language (for empirical evidence, see Fedorenko, Patel, Casasanto, Winawer, & Gibson, 2009;Koelsch, Gunter, et al, 2005;Kunert et al, , 2016Musso et al, 2015;Slevc et al, 2009;Van de Cavey & Hartsuiker, 2016).…”