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Syntax in music and language: The role of cognitive control

Syntax in music and language: The role of cognitive control L. Robert Slevc (slevc@umd.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 USA Jason G. Reitman (jreitman@wesleyan.edu) Wesleyan University Middletown, CT 06459 USA Brooke M. Okada (bokada@umd.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 USA Abstract The relationship between structural (or syntactic) processing in music and in language is not yet clear. Evidence indicating that these two processes are shared conflicts with other results suggesting that they are largely distinct. These conflicting findings suggest that musical and linguistic processing may share some, but not all, underlying processes, raising the question of what exactly those shared processes might be. Two experiments tested the idea that one shared process is cognitive control by pairing manipulations of musical structure with the Stroop task, a standard test of cognitive control. Manipulations of harmonic expectancy, but not of timbral expectancy, interacted with Stroop interference effects, suggesting that cognitive control is at least one specific process underlying shared syntactic processing in music and language. Keywords: cognitive control; music and language; musical syntax Introduction Interest in the relationship between music and language has a long history, dating back at least to Darwin (1871). Over the last several years, a more specific focus on the relationship between structural (or syntactic) processing in music and language has received increasing attention (for recent reviews, see Patel, 2008; Slevc, 2012; Tillmann, 2012). This likely is due, at least in part, to an influential proposal about the relationship between structural processing in language and music: Patel’s (2003) shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (SSIRH; see also Patel, 2008). The SSIRH proposes that music and language involve separate representations (e.g., nouns and verbs in language, tonal functions in music), but recruit a shared set of cognitive resources that are required to integrate these separate representations into evolving sequences. There is a growing body of evidence supporting the SSIRH. Much of this evidence comes from experiments using interference paradigms, where participants are simultaneously presented with both musical and linguistic stimuli. In these paradigms, syntactic manipulations in both domains are crossed to look for interactive effects that indicate shared processing (vs. additive effects, which would indicate independent processes). For example, an electrophysiological response characteristic of a violation of linguistic syntax (the left anterior negativity, or LAN) is reduced when linguistic syntactic violations are paired with a concurrent music-syntactic irregularity (Koelsch, Gunter, Wittfoth, & Sammler, 2005). Similarly, sung complex sentences are especially difficult to understand when critical regions are sung out-of-key (Fedorenko, Patel, Casasanto, Winawer, & Gibson, 2009). Other behavioral evidence comes from on-line sentence processing paradigms, where readers’ slowed processing of temporary syntactic ambiguities is especially pronounced when the disambiguating word is paired with a harmonically unexpected chord (Slevc, Rosenberg, & Patel, 2009; also see Hoch, Poulin-Charronnat, & Tillmann, 2011, for related findings). More specifically, Slevc et al. (2009) relied on garden path effects, where readers are slower to comprehend the disambiguating word was in a sentence like “The scientist proved the hypothesis was false” compared to an unambiguous context like “The scientist proved that the hypothesis was false.” This slowed processing presumably reflects the need to revise an initial syntactic interpretation where the hypothesis was interpreted as the direct object of the verb proved rather than as the subject of an embedded sentence complement. This garden path effect was more pronounced when the disambiguating word (was) was accompanied by a harmonically unexpected chord (but not when accompanied by a chord of unexpected timbre). Importantly, such an interaction did not emerge for semantically unexpected words (e.g., pigs as a continuation of “The mailman was afraid of…”) suggesting that the interactive processes are specific to syntax. However, a more recent finding casts doubt on this last conclusion: the same harmonic manipulations did lead to interactive effects when paired with sentences containing “semantic garden paths” such as “The old man went to the bank to withdraw his net which was empty” (Perruchet & Poulin-Charronnat, 2013). Thus it seems that these interactive effects (and the shared integration resource of the SSIRH) may not be specific to syntactic processing per se. In addition, some recent neuroimaging studies have not found substantial overlap between neural regions implicated in the processing of language and music (Fedorenko, Behr,