Projects

Music, like language, is widely known to communicate emotional meaning. Yet, there is still much debate on whether musical information can convey indexical and symbolic meaning, similar to language (strong overlap), or not (domain independence). Past experiments using Reaction Time (RT) measures have found that when syntactic complexities in language coincide with harmonic music violations, enhanced processing difficulties suggest shared cognitive resources. However, researchers failed to find similar interactions when semantically manipulated words were present, implying that the overlap in cognitive resources between music and language does not extend to semantics. However, it is not clear whether the distinction in resource sharing between domains is limited to syntactic properties of language, or whether it depends on a need to reanalyze the language - the nature of the semantic stimuli used in past research does not tease these possibilities apart because the semantic manipulation focused on expectancy violations rather than sensibility/plausibility violations (i.e., anomalies). This experiment builds upon past research by contrasting plausible expectancy violations to anomalous expectancy violations and examining distinct event-related potential (ERP) components that index word recognition processes related to semantic expectancy violations (N400) and anomalies (LPC). Unlike RT measures, ERP components are specific enough to allow us to understand what cognitive processes are affected by different experimental manipulations. Participants will perform a self-paced reading task where target words accompany musical chords in a 3 (word: expected, unexpected, anomalous) by 2 (music: in-key, out-of-key) factorial design. This study, unlike past experiments, includes a new anomalous language condition. Participants will be required to reanalyze past contexts to integrate semantic linguistic anomalies into past contexts similar to the syntactic stimuli used in past experiments. We hypothesize that if evidence of a significant interaction is found for the LPC component, it will illustrate domain overlap for reintegration processes. In contrast, evidence of a significant interaction for the N400 component would suggest a domain overlap of expectancy. By identifying the neuro-cognitive overlap of semantic processing between music and language, researchers will better understand the mechanisms used for reintegration (LPC) and expectancy (N400) across both domains. In addition, the participants in this study will consist of individuals across the range of musical experience and competence, which we will measure with a musical use questionnaire (MUSE) and a music aptitude assessment (AMMA) so that we can perform an exploratory analysis that tests whether the resource-sharing between music and language depends on musical competence or experience.

Readers take advantage of peripherally available information within two “spans;” within the perceptual span, they perceive the visuospatial layout of the upcoming text and use it to plan the location of their next fixation, and within the word identification span, they perceive information about upcoming word identities and use that to initiate word recognition prior to fixation. We hypothesize that the size of the perceptual span relates to non-linguistic peripheral visual processing abilities whereas the size of the word identification span relates to the ability to use peripheral information to initiate word recognition (assessed by the size of the peripheral word superiority effect in which letters are identified more accurately in words than non-words, especially in the periphery). We aim to independently measure the sizes of these spans using two variations of an eye-tracking paradigm: one that disrupts the ability to determine the spaces between words (assessing the perceptual span) and another that disrupts the ability to determine the identities of the letters within words (assessing the word identification span).