Structural Integration in Language and Music: Evidence

The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Abstract This paper investigates whether language and music share cognitive resources for structural processing. We report an experiment which used sung materials and manipulated linguistic complexity (subject-extracted relative clauses, object-extracted relative clauses) and musical complexity (short / long harmonic distance between the critical note and the preceding tonal context, auditory oddball involving loudness increase on the critical note relative to the preceding context). The auditory oddball manipulation was included to test whether the difference between short-and long-harmonic-distance conditions may be due to any salient or unexpected acoustic event. The critical dependent measure involved comprehension accuracies to questions about the propositional content of the sentences asked at the end of each trial. The results revealed an interaction between linguistic and musical complexity such that the difference between the subject-and object-extracted relative clause conditions was larger in the long-harmonic-distance conditions, compared to the short-harmonic-distance and the auditory-oddball conditions. These results provide evidence for an overlap in structural processing between language and music.