Grammaticality judgments in linguistic and musical structures: is there behavioural evidence for a common processing system?
Citation
(2016) Grammaticality judgments in
linguistic and musical structures: is
there behavioural evidence for a
common processing system?, no. 72.
Abstract
A connection between language and music has been a matter of debate both in theory and
empirical research. In theory, generativist approaches have posited common syntactic rules
for music and language. In empirical research, efforts have been made to localize musical and
linguistic syntactic processing in the brain, while others have suggested a common processing
system. An online, graded grammaticality judgment task was administered to typical adults
with and without music education. The stimuli contained structural deviances both in
language and music: for linguistic syntax, deviant stimuli with adjective-noun disagreement
were read, whereas for musical syntax, deviant stimuli with cadence violation were heard.
These regular and irregular stimuli were judged alongside semantically regular and irregular
sentences. For semantics, deviant sentences contained reversed thematic roles of nonreversible
verbs, that is verbs that demand a [+animate] agent and a [-animate] theme. The
participants read or heard the sequences and had to decide on a scale of 1-5 how acceptable
the presented stimulus was. Reaction times were also recorded. It was hypothesized that
stimuli with structural deviations would yield stricter judgments, whereas semantically
deviant stimuli would yield milder judgments. No specific hypothesis was made on reaction
times, although it was hypothesized that the group that had reported some years of music
education would be quicker to decide on deviant music stimuli. However, it was observed that
linguistic stimuli as a whole caused a binary judgment, whereas deviant music stimuli were
more evenly distributed. No effect of music education was observed on the participants'
performance. Optimality Theory suggests that constraint rules are hierarchically organized for
each language, resulting in hard and soft constraints. A similar approach is observed in Generative Theory of Tonal Music and there have been some efforts to align these theories in
a common framework for some levels of linguistic and music analysis. It is suggested that
the constraints used for linguistic stimuli are hard, whereas the constraint used for music
stimuli is soft. However, these two theoretical approaches have not been aligned in terms of
syntactic analysis; thus further theoretical and empirical research is needed.