Structural Integration in Language and Music: Evidence for a Shared System.
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Fedorenko et al. InPress.pdf
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Author(s)
Fedorenko, Evelina G.
Patel, Aniruddh
Casasanto, Daniel
Winawer, Jonathan
Gibson, Edward A.
Date Issued
January 2009
Journal
Memory and Cognition
Publisher
Springer New York
Citation
Fedorenko, Evelina et al. “Structural Integration in Language and Music: Evidence for a Shared System.” Memory & Cognition 37.1 (2009) : 1-9.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
In this study, we investigate whether language and music share cognitive resources for structural processing. We
report an experiment that used sung materials and manipulated linguistic complexity (subject-extracted relative
clauses, object-extracted relative clauses) and musical complexity (in-key critical note, out-of-key critical note,
auditory anomaly on the critical note involving a loudness increase). The auditory-anomaly manipulation was
included in order to test whether the difference between in-key and out-of-key conditions might be due to any salient,
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 out-of-key condition than in the in-key and auditory-anomaly conditions.
These results provide evidence for an overlap in structural processing between language and music.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3758/mc.37.1.1
