Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
J Cogn Neurosci. 2011 Mar;23(3):604-21. doi: 10.1162/jocn.2009.21383. Epub 2009 Nov 19.
Recent studies have shown that music is capable of conveying semantically meaningful concepts. Several questions have subsequently arisen particularly with regard to the precise mechanisms underlying the communication of musical meaning as well as the role of specific musical features. The present article reports three studies investigating the role of affect expressed by various musical features in priming subsequent word processing at the semantic level. By means of an affective priming paradigm, it was shown that both musically trained and untrained participants evaluated emotional words congruous to the affect expressed by a preceding chord faster than words incongruous to the preceding chord. This behavioral effect was accompanied by an N400, an ERP typically linked with semantic processing, which was specifically modulated by the (mis)match between the prime and the target. This finding was shown for the musical parameter of consonance/dissonance (Experiment 1) and then extended to mode (major/minor) (Experiment 2) and timbre (Experiment 3). Seeing that the N400 is taken to reflect the processing of meaning, the present findings suggest that the emotional expression of single musical features is understood by listeners as such and is probably processed on a level akin to other affective communications (i.e., prosody or vocalizations) because it interferes with subsequent semantic processing. There were no group differences, suggesting that musical expertise does not have an influence on the processing of emotional expression in music and its semantic connotations.
最近的研究表明，音乐能够传达具有语义意义的概念。随后出现了几个问题，特别是关于音乐意义传达的精确机制以及特定音乐特征的作用。本文报告了三项研究，探讨了各种音乐特征所表达的情感在语义水平上后续单词处理中的启动作用。通过情感启动范式，研究表明，受过音乐训练和未受过音乐训练的参与者都能更快地评估与前一个和弦所表达的情感一致的情感词汇，而不是与前一个和弦不一致的词汇。这种行为效应伴随着 N400，这是一种通常与语义处理相关的 ERP，它特别受到启动和目标之间（不）匹配的调节。该发现适用于音乐参数的和谐/不和谐（实验 1），然后扩展到调式（大调/小调）（实验 2）和音色（实验 3）。鉴于 N400 被认为反映了意义的处理，本研究结果表明，单个音乐特征的情感表达被听众理解为这样的，并可能以类似于其他情感交流（即韵律或发声）的方式进行处理，因为它会干扰后续的语义处理。组间没有差异，这表明音乐专业知识不会影响对音乐中情感表达及其语义内涵的处理。
