György Dávid, Saddy Douglas, Kotz Sonja A, Franck Julie
Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Neurodynamics, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom.
Front Psychol. 2025 Jun 13;16:1512267. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1512267. eCollection 2025.
Accumulating evidence shows improved syntactic processing after exposure to a rhythmically regular compared to an irregular musical prime, environmental noise, or silence. One potentially shared system between musical rhythm and language processing may be responsible for the construction of hierarchical sequences. Following findings of a shorter-lived rhythmic priming effect in Jabberwocky and more precise neural tracking of linguistic constituents in natural language than in Jabberwocky, the present study hypothesized that (a) hierarchical structure building constitutes a key shared mechanism between rhythm and language processing and (b) semantic information may also play a role in structure building. In three experiments, French-speaking typical adults listened to 32-s rhythmic primes before completing six-sentence blocks of grammaticality judgment on natural language and jabberwocky materials in lab and online. Results showed a heavily reduced priming effect present only in the first sentence after a prime in Experiment 1 (natural language, online) and no priming in effects in Experiments 2 (jabberwocky, online) and 3 (natural language, in lab). Replicating previous results, overall grammaticality judgment d' correlated with performance in a rhythm discrimination task. In two out of three experiments, grammaticality judgment performance correlated with rhythm discrimination. These correlations support the hypothesis of a domain-general cognitive network responsible for hierarchical structure building in rhythm and language processing, but do not rule out alternative accounts. However, the priming data showcase that the rhythmic priming effect is reduced when typical speakers process sentences containing linguistic information available at all levels compared to atypical populations processing natural language or typical adults processing syntactic structures in the absence of lexical semantics, and do not suggest a key role of lexico-semantic information in rhythmic priming. Furthermore, relationships between the rhythmic priming effect, rhythm discrimination, and spontaneous speech synchronization suggest that sensitivity to rhythmic priming may be influenced by several factors.
越来越多的证据表明，与不规则的音乐启动刺激、环境噪音或安静状态相比，接触有节奏规律的音乐启动刺激后，句法处理能力会得到改善。音乐节奏和语言处理之间一个潜在的共享系统可能负责层次序列的构建。继发现在《 jabberwocky 》中节奏启动效应持续时间较短，以及在自然语言中对语言成分的神经追踪比在《 jabberwocky 》中更精确之后，本研究假设：（ a ）层次结构构建是节奏和语言处理之间的关键共享机制；（ b ）语义信息在结构构建中也可能发挥作用。在三个实验中，说法语的典型成年人在对实验室和在线的自然语言及《 jabberwocky 》材料进行六句语法判断之前，先听了 32 秒的节奏启动刺激。结果显示，在实验 1 （自然语言，在线）中，启动刺激后仅在第一句话中出现大幅降低的启动效应，而在实验 2 （《 jabberwocky 》，在线）和实验 3 （自然语言，实验室）中没有启动效应。重复之前的结果，总体语法判断 d' 与节奏辨别任务中的表现相关。在三个实验中的两个实验中，语法判断表现与节奏辨别相关。这些相关性支持了一个负责节奏和语言处理中层次结构构建的领域通用认知网络的假设，但不排除其他解释。然而，启动数据表明，与处理自然语言的非典型人群或在没有词汇语义的情况下处理句法结构的典型成年人相比，典型说话者在处理包含各级可用语言信息的句子时，节奏启动效应会降低，并且没有表明词汇语义信息在节奏启动中起关键作用。此外，节奏启动效应、节奏辨别和自发语音同步之间的关系表明，对节奏启动的敏感性可能受多种因素影响。
