Selectional restriction and chord sequence incongruities: Further evidence from event-related potentials in processing language and music

Abstract

Cho, Euiyon et al. 2016. Selectional restriction and chord sequence incongruities: Further evidence from event-related potentials in processing language and music. Discourse and Cogniyion xxxxxxxxxx. In order to test the domain-specificity/generality of language and music processing, this study used the event-related potential (ERP) paradigm to compare neural responses elicited from violations in language and music. Employing selectional restriction (SR) for language and chord sequence (CS) for music, sentences and musical pieces were constructed in which the sentence/musical piece-final verb or chord was either congruous or incongruous with the preceding structural context. A within-participants design using 20 college students revealed that linguistic and musical structural violations elicited different ERP components: N400 followed by N600 for SR, and anterior P600 for CS. With the neural correlates of their inherently different properties factored out, the results in our study suggest that a brain response elicited by a music-syntactic violation of CS was generated in brain areas overlapping those involved in the processing of semantic-syntactic SR, previously considered to be domain-specific for language processing.(145)