Researches of the Relationship of Music and Language on Three Levels: Syntax, Semantics and Perception of Pitch and Rhythm

YU Pei; ZHANG La-Xin

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (5) : 1078-1084.

Researches of the Relationship of Music and Language on Three Levels: Syntax, Semantics and Perception of Pitch and Rhythm

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Abstract

Since accumulated evidences have revealed that music and language do have some relationship, this field of study has attracted more and more interest. As scientists have addressed, music and language have many features in common. They are both structured sequences which are arranged according to some rules, which is syntax. Also, they can both express meanings and emotions, which can be called semantics. Thirdly, they both have elements like pitch and rhythm. And the last, music and language are both human-unique and universal involved. To unveil the relationship of music and language, a lot of researches have been conducted to investigate the neural basis of them. Whether shared neural basis is involved in music and language has become the focus of these researches. Based on the common features of music and language, studies in this field are of 3 levels, syntax, semantics and the perception of pitch and rhythm. On the level of syntax, shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (SSIRH) was raised in 2003. It suggests that the brain regions for syntax processing can be divided into processing regions and representation regions, and music and language may share the processing regions. Comparative studies were done and most of them well supported SSIRH. In these studies, several distinctive ERP components were found such as ERAN and N500, which later became the standard indicator of music incongruousness and were applied to many comparative studies. However, SSIRH has not been proved yet. More evidences are needed to demonstrate the accurate regions and the processing mechanism in detail. On the level of semantics, researchers found that music, even single chord could elicit a very similar N400 effect to that of language in an ERP experiment. These findings suggest that music is able to convey conceptual information like language, and they probably share some semantic processing resources. Since the processing mechanism and its location in brain remain unknown, further studies are required to illuminate the relationship of music and language in semantic level. On the level of pitch and rhythm perception, available works are inferior to that of above two levels in both amount and quality. Studies on rhythm perception in music and language are especially rare due to lack of quantitative criteria with few ones implying that there’s some connection between music and language. On the other hand, studies on pitch perception are relatively more. However, most of them put emphasis on the correlation of pitch detect ability between music and language. The limited comparative studies on processing of pitch perception in music and language merely discovered the differences between them. If music and language indeed have relationship in pitch perception, more comparative studies should be undertaken to clarify not only their different but also their common neural basis. All together, this review has tried to inform the reader with researches on the relationship of music and language processing and help to establish a comprehensive map in this field.

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music / language / syntax / semantics / pitch or rhythm

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Researches of the Relationship of Music and Language on Three Levels: Syntax, Semantics and Perception of Pitch and Rhythm[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2013, 36(5): 1078-1084

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