College of Education, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China.
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK.
Psychophysiology. 2018 Feb;55(2). doi: 10.1111/psyp.12983. Epub 2017 Aug 23.
Syntactic processing is essential for musical understanding. Although the processing of harmonic syntax has been well studied, very little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying rhythmic syntactic processing. The present study investigated the neural processing of rhythmic syntax and whether and to what extent long-term musical training impacts such processing. Fourteen musicians and 14 nonmusicians listened to syntactic-regular or syntactic-irregular rhythmic sequences and judged the completeness of these sequences. Nonmusicians, as well as musicians, showed a P600 effect to syntactic-irregular endings, indicating that musical exposure and perceptual learning of music are sufficient to enable nonmusicians to process rhythmic syntax at the late stage. However, musicians, but not nonmusicians, also exhibited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN) response to syntactic-irregular endings, which suggests that musical training only modulates the early but not the late stage of rhythmic syntactic processing. These findings revealed for the first time the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of rhythmic syntax in music, which has important implications for theories of hierarchically organized music cognition and comparative studies of syntactic processing in music and language.
句法处理对于音乐理解至关重要。尽管已经对和声句法的处理进行了深入研究，但对于节奏句法处理的神经机制知之甚少。本研究探讨了节奏句法的神经处理，以及长期的音乐训练是否以及在何种程度上影响这种处理。14 名音乐家和 14 名非音乐家听了句法规则或句法不规则的节奏序列，并判断这些序列的完整性。非音乐家和音乐家都对句法不规则的结尾表现出 P600 效应，这表明音乐暴露和对音乐的感知学习足以使非音乐家能够在后期处理节奏句法。然而，只有音乐家而不是非音乐家对句法不规则的结尾表现出早期右前负向（ERAN）反应，这表明音乐训练仅调节节奏句法处理的早期阶段而不调节后期阶段。这些发现首次揭示了音乐中节奏句法处理的神经机制，这对于层次化音乐认知理论以及音乐和语言中句法处理的比较研究具有重要意义。
