Dissociable pitch processing mechanisms in lexical and melodic contexts revealed by ERPs

The current ERP study examined the neural substrates for pitch processing in music and in tonal language with phrases ending in either congruous or incongruous pitches. In a tonal language, like Chinese, pitch is lexically relevant as it can change the meaning of words, and it could therefore be hypothesized that pitch information under this condition is processed differently from musical pitch. Female Chinese musicians were chosen as listeners for their ample exposure to music and a tonal language. Pitch violations in both domains were associated with a frontally distributed late positive component (LPC). In addition to evoking an N400 for language condition, pitch processing as revealed by the LPCs is left lateralized for tonal language and right lateralized for music. We propose that our data may imply different brain resources engaging in pitch processing depending on whether its function is lexical, as in a tonal language like Chinese, or musical in nature.