The Influence of Task-Irrelevant Music on Language Processing: Syntactic and Semantic Structures

Abstract

Recent research has suggested that music and language processing share neural resources, leading to new hypotheses about interference in the simultaneous processing of these two structures. The present study investigated the effect of a musical chord's tonal function on syntactic processing (Experiment 1) and semantic processing (Experiment 2) using a cross-modal paradigm and controlling for acoustic differences. Participants read sentences and performed a lexical decision task on the last word, which was, syntactically or semantically, expected or unexpected. The simultaneously presented (task-irrelevant) musical sequences ended on either an expected tonic or a less-expected subdominant chord. Experiment 1 revealed interactive effects between music-syntactic and linguistic-syntactic processing. Experiment 2 showed only main effects of both music-syntactic and linguistic-semantic expectations. An additional analysis over the two experiments revealed that linguistic violations interacted with musical violations, though not differently as a function of the type of linguistic violations. The present findings were discussed in light of currently available data on the processing of music as well as of syntax and semantics in language, leading to the hypothesis that resources might be shared for structural integration processes and sequencing.

Processing structure in language and music: a case for shared reliance on cognitive control

“…For example, an electrophysiological effect characteristic of linguistic syntactic violations (the left anterior negativity, or LAN) is reduced when the linguistic manipulation is paired with a concurrent music-syntactic irregularity (Koelsch et al, 2005b). Similarly, facilitation for syntactically expected words in a lexical decision task is reduced when paired with harmonically unexpected chords (Hoch et al, 2011), and comprehension of sung complex sentences (object relative clauses) is worse when the critical regions are sung out-of-key cf. Fiveash & Pammer, 2014).…”

“…First, non-structural musical manipulations of timbre or amplitude -investigated as controls for attentional capture -do not interact with linguistic syntactic or semantic manipulations Fiveash & Pammer, 2014;Koelsch et al, 2005b;Slevc et al, 2009). Second, although semantically surprising words presumably also capture attention, manipulations of harmonic structure have generally not been found to interact with semantic unexpectancy (Besson, Faïta, Peretz, Bonnel, & Requin, 1998;Bonnel, Faïta, Peretz, & Besson, 2001;Hoch et al, 2011;Koelsch et al, 2005b;Perruchet & Poulin-Charronnat, 2013;Slevc et al, 2009; but see Poulin-Charronnat et al, 2005;Steinbeis & Koelsch, 2008). Thus, neither processes specific to syntactic processing nor general attentional mechanisms seem to adequately predict when musical and linguistic parsing do and do not interact.…”

“…Specifically, musical structure processing seems to share resources involved in processing syntactic errors (Hoch et al, 2011;Koelsch et al, 2005b;Steinbeis & Koelsch, 2008), syntactic complexity Fiveash & Pammer, 2014), and both syntactic and semantic garden paths (Perruchet & Poulin-Charronnat, 2013;Slevc et al, 2009), but not resources involved in processing semantically surprising words (Hoch et al, 2011;Koelsch et al, 2005b;Perruchet & Poulin-Charronnat, 2013;Slevc et al, 2009) 2 or related to the difference between intact and scrambled sentences (e.g., Fedorenko et al, 2012). One way to characterize this distinction is that the aspects of language processing that do interact with musical structure require not only the processing of an unexpected element, but also the revision or reinterpretation of a previous commitment to a particular (syntactic or semantic) interpretation.…”

“…In particular, garden path sentences (Slevc et al, 2009) and morpho-syntactic errors (Hoch et al, 2011;Koelsch et al, 2005b) involve reinterpretation of an incrementally constructed initial syntactic analysis based on late-arriving syntactic information (cf. Novick et al, 2005).…”

“…These inferior frontal regions have also been implicated in the processing of rhythmic structure (Vuust, Roepstorff, Wallentin, Mouridsen, & Østergaard, 2006;Vuust, Wallentin, Mouridsen, Østergaard, & Roepstorff, 2011), and both frontal and temporal regions show equal sensitivity to temporal structure in music and speech (Abrams et al, 2011). Finally, there is a growing body of behavioral evidence linking the processing of musical and linguistic structure (e.g., Hoch, Poulin-Charronnat, & Tillmann, 2011;Fedorenko, Patel, Casasanto, Winawer, & Gibson, 2009;Slevc, Rosenberg, & Patel, 2009), as discussed below.…”