Making psycholinguistics musical: self-paced reading time evidence for shared processing of linguistic and musical syntax.

Full Abstract

Linguistic processing, especially syntactic processing, is often considered a hallmark of human cognition; thus, the domain specificity or domain generality of syntactic processing has attracted considerable debate. The present experiments address this issue by simultaneously manipulating syntactic processing demands in language and music. Participants performed self-paced reading of garden path sentences, in which structurally unexpected words cause temporary syntactic processing difficulty. A musical chord accompanied each sentence segment, with the resulting sequence forming a coherent chord progression. When structurally unexpected words were paired with harmonically unexpected chords, participants showed substantially enhanced garden path effects. No such interaction was observed when the critical words violated semantic expectancy or when the critical chords violated timbral expectancy. These results support a prediction of the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (Patel, 2003), which suggests that music and language draw on a common pool of limited processing resources for integrating incoming elements into syntactic structures. Notations of the stimuli from this study may be downloaded from pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Author information

Author/s: Slevc, L Robert (LR); Rosenberg, Jason C (JC); Patel, Aniruddh D (AD);

Affiliation: Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA. slevc(-atsign-)rice.edu

Grants: F32 DC-008732 (Agency:NIDCD NIH HHS) ; R01 HD051030-06 (Agency:NICHD NIH HHS) ; R01 MH-64733 (Agency:NIMH NIH HHS)

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Psychonomic bulletin & review (Psychon Bull Rev), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Apr; vol 16 (issue 2) : pp 374-81

Dates: Created 2009/03/18; Completed 2009/06/11;

PMID: 19293110, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 6/11/2009, IMS Date: 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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