Syntactic processing in music and language: Parallel abnormalities observed in congenital amusia

Sun, Yanan; Lu, Xuejing; Ho, Hao Tam; Johnson, Blake W.; Sammler, Daniela; Thompson, William Forde

doi:10.1016/j.nicl.2018.05.032

Cited by 22 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 90 publications

(124 reference statements)

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“…Many studies examining temporal hierarchy in syntax have implicated the left IFG in both the music and language domains (for a review, see Fitch and Martins, 2014). For example, the left IFG was shown to be responsive to violations of linguistic and musical syntax (Fedorenko et al, 2009;Koelsch et al, 2005b;Slevc et al, 2009;Sun et al, 2018). In the present study, we found significant overlap between musical rhythm and linguistic syntax, which is in line with these previous findings.…”

Section: Temporal Hierarchy Processingsupporting

confidence: 91%

Shared neural resources of rhythm and syntax: An ALE Meta-Analysis

Heard

Lee

2019

Preprint

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A growing body of evidence has highlighted behavioral connections between musical rhythm and linguistic syntax, suggesting that these may be mediated by common neural resources. Here, we performed a quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies using activation likelihood estimate (ALE) to localize the shared neural structures engaged in a representative set of musical rhythm (rhythm, beat, and meter) and linguistic syntax (merge movement, and reanalysis). Rhythm engaged a bilateral sensorimotor network throughout the brain consisting of the inferior frontal gyri, supplementary motor area, superior temporal gyri/temporoparietal junction, insula, the intraparietal lobule, and putamen. By contrast, syntax mostly recruited the left sensorimotor network including the inferior frontal gyrus, posterior superior temporal gyrus, premotor cortex, and supplementary motor area. Intersections between rhythm and syntax maps yielded overlapping regions in the left inferior frontal gyrus, left supplementary motor area, and bilateral insula-neural substrates involved in temporal hierarchy processing and predictive coding. Together, this is the first neuroimaging meta-analysis providing detailed anatomical overlap of sensorimotor regions recruited for musical rhythm and linguistic syntax. Figure 1: Schematics of rhythm and syntax. (A) An example music sequence consisting of quarter and eighth notes. Rhythms (in red) are the pattern of onsets perceived by the listener. Beat and meter (in green and blue) are extracted from the rhythms by the listener. (B) Three representative examples of syntax explored in the present meta-analysis. Merge brings together words or smaller phrases into larger phrases. Movement processes dependent nodes that are often found in whquestions. Reanalysis occurs when extracting complicated grammatical roles resolving ambiguous word orders, such as in the garden path sentence exhibited here. NP: noun phrase; Sent: sentence; Det: determinant; N: noun; Adj: adjective; Wh: question word; VP: verb phrase; Pa: participle.

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Section: Temporal Hierarchy Processingsupporting

confidence: 91%

Shared neural resources of rhythm and syntax: An ALE Meta-Analysis

Heard

Lee

2019

Preprint

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“…Several ERP studies have suggested that early cortical responses in amusia might be preserved under unconscious conditions (Zendel et al, 2015;see also Peretz et al, 2009). For example, Zendel et al (2015) showed that amusics elicited a normal early right anterior negativity (ERAN) for out-of-tune and out-of-key notes in the unconscious but not in the conscious condition, although a recent study by Sun et al (2018) showed that the ERAN was absent in the amusic group during the implicit (unconscious) task. It is worth noting that the elicitation of the ERAN relies on long-term learned knowledge of syntactic regularities in music (Koelsch, 2012;Trainor, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impaired emotional processing of chords in congenital amusia: Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence

Zhou

Liu

Jiang

et al. 2019

Brain and Cognition

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This study investigated whether individuals with congenital amusia, a neurogenetic disorder of musical pitch perception, were able to process musical emotions in single chords either automatically or consciously. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used a cross-modal affective priming paradigm to elicit automatic emotional processing through ERPs, in which target facial expressions were preceded by either affectively congruent or incongruent chords with a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 200 msec. Results revealed automatic emotional processing of major/minor triads (Experiment 1) and consonant/dissonant chords (Experiment 2) in controls, who showed longer reaction times and increased N400 for incongruent than congruent trials, while amusics failed to exhibit such a priming effect at both behavioral and electrophysiological levels. In Experiment 3, we further examined conscious emotional evaluation of the same chords in amusia. Results showed that amusics were unable to consciously differentiate the emotions conveyed by major and minor chords and by consonant and dissonant chords, as compared with controls. These findings suggest the impairment in automatic and conscious emotional processing of music in amusia. The implications of these findings in relation to musical emotional processing are discussed.

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“…Behaviorally, amusics failed to perceive harmonic syntactic structures based on the local dependency in the authentic cadence, being unable to distinguish a tonic chord from a Neapolitan chord (Jiang, Liu, & Thompson, ), despite showing intact implicit processing of such structures (Tillmann, Gosselin, Bigand, & Peretz, ). Using ERPs, Zendel, Lagrois, Robitaille, and Peretz () found that amusics elicited an ERAN in response to out‐of‐key and out‐of‐tune notes in melodies in the implicit but not in the explicit task, although a recent study by Sun, Lu et al () showed that amusics failed to elicit an ERAN for out‐of‐key notes in melodies even in an implicit task. In order to rule out the possible confounding effect of auditory sensory violations associated with out‐of‐key and out‐of‐tune notes, it is necessary to design a more carefully controlled study to further examine the neural processing of syntactic structures in amusia, for example, by using in‐key notes or chords.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Abnormal neural responses to harmonic syntactic structures in congenital amusia

et al. 2019

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In music, harmonic syntactic structures are organized hierarchically through local and long-distance dependencies. This study investigated whether congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of pitch perception, is associated with impaired processing of harmonic syntactic structures. For stimuli, we used harmonic sequences containing two phrases, where the first phrase ended with a half cadence and the second with an authentic cadence. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the ending chord of the authentic cadence to be either syntactically regular or irregular based on local dependencies. Sixteen amusics and 16 controls judged the expectedness of these chords while their EEG waveforms were recorded. In comparison to the regular endings, irregular endings elicited an ERAN, an N5, and a late positive component in controls but not in amusics, indicating that amusics were impaired in processing local syntactic dependencies. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the half cadence of the harmonic sequences to either adhere to or violate long-distance syntactic dependencies.In response to irregular harmonic sequences, an ERAN-like component and an N5were elicited in controls but not in amusics, suggesting that amusics were impaired in processing long-distance syntactic dependencies. Furthermore, for controls, the neural processing of local and long-distance syntactic dependencies was correlated at the later integration stage but not at the early detection stage. These findings indicate that amusia is associated with impairment in the detection and integration of local and long-distance syntactic violations. The implications of these findings in terms of hierarchical music-syntactic processing are discussed. K E Y W O R D Scongenital amusia, harmonic syntax, hierarchical structure, local dependency, long-distance dependency 2 of 15 | ZHOU et al.

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Syntactic processing in music and language: Parallel abnormalities observed in congenital amusia

Cited by 22 publications

References 90 publications

Shared neural resources of rhythm and syntax: An ALE Meta-Analysis

Shared neural resources of rhythm and syntax: An ALE Meta-Analysis

Impaired emotional processing of chords in congenital amusia: Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence

Abnormal neural responses to harmonic syntactic structures in congenital amusia

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