Syntactic processing in music and language: Effects of interrupting auditory streams with alternating timbres

Publication date: Available online 8 May 2018
Source:International Journal of Psychophysiology
Author(s): Anna Fiveash, William F. Thompson, Nicholas A. Badcock, Genevieve McArthur
Both music and language rely on the processing of spectral (pitch, timbre) and temporal (rhythm) information to create structure and meaning from incoming auditory streams. Previous behavioural results have shown that interrupting a melodic stream with unexpected changes in timbre leads to reduced syntactic processing. Such findings suggest that syntactic processing is conditional on successful streaming of incoming sequential information. The current study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether (1) the effect of alternating timbres on syntactic processing is reflected in a reduced brain response to syntactic violations, and (2) the phenomenon is similar for music and language. Participants listened to melodies and sentences with either one timbre (piano or one voice) or three timbres (piano, guitar, and vibraphone, or three different voices). Half the stimuli contained syntactic violations: an out-of-key note in the melodies, and a phrase-structure violation in the sentences. We found smaller ERPs to syntactic violations in music in the three-timbre compared to the one-timbre condition, reflected in a reduced early right anterior negativity (ERAN). A similar but non-significant pattern was observed for language stimuli in both the early left anterior negativity (ELAN) and the left anterior negativity (LAN) ERPs. The results suggest that timbre disruptions to auditory streaming reduce syntactic processing for music.



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