School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, USA.
Callier Center for Communication Disorders, The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, USA.
Psychol Res. 2023 Oct;87(7):2218-2227. doi: 10.1007/s00426-023-01808-w. Epub 2023 Feb 28.
Binaural beats-an auditory illusion produced when two pure tones of slightly different frequencies are dichotically presented-have been shown to modulate various cognitive and psychological states. Here, we investigated the effects of binaural beat stimulation on auditory sentence processing that required interpretation of syntactic relations (Experiment 1) or an evaluation of syntactic well formedness (Experiment 2) with a large cohort of healthy young adults (N = 200). In both experiments, participants performed a language task after listening to one of four sounds (i.e., between-subject design): theta (7 Hz), beta (18 Hz), and gamma (40 Hz) binaural beats embedded in music, or the music only (baseline). In Experiment 1, 100 participants indicated the gender of a noun linked to a transitive action verb in spoken sentences containing either a subject or object-relative center-embedded clause. We found that both beta and gamma binaural beats yielded better performance, compared to the baseline, especially for syntactically more complex object-relative sentences. To determine if the binaural beat effect can be generalized to another type of syntactic analysis, we conducted Experiment 2 in which another 100 participants indicated whether or not there was a grammatical error in spoken sentences. However, none of the binaural beats yielded better performance for this task indicating that the benefit of beta and gamma binaural beats may be specific to the interpretation of syntactic relations. Together, we demonstrate, for the first time, the positive impact of binaural beats on auditory language comprehension. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
双耳节拍——当两个略微不同频率的纯音以分听的方式呈现时产生的听觉错觉——已被证明可以调节各种认知和心理状态。在这里，我们研究了双耳节拍刺激对听觉句子处理的影响，这些句子处理需要解释句法关系（实验 1）或评估句法的正确性（实验 2），使用了大量健康年轻成年人（N=200）。在这两个实验中，参与者在听完四种声音中的一种（即组间设计）后完成语言任务：θ（7 Hz）、β（18 Hz）和γ（40 Hz）嵌入音乐中的双耳节拍，或仅音乐（基线）。在实验 1 中，100 名参与者在包含主语或宾语关系从句的口语句子中指出与及物动词相关的名词的性别。我们发现，与基线相比，β和γ双耳节拍都产生了更好的表现，尤其是对于句法上更复杂的宾语关系从句。为了确定双耳节拍效应是否可以推广到另一种类型的句法分析，我们在实验 2 中让另外 100 名参与者指出口语句子中是否存在语法错误。然而，对于这个任务，没有一个双耳节拍产生了更好的表现，这表明β和γ双耳节拍的好处可能是特定于句法关系的解释。总的来说，我们首次证明了双耳节拍对听觉语言理解的积极影响。讨论了理论和实际意义。
