Iconic Meaning in Music: An Event-Related Potential Study

Although there has been extensive research on the processing of the emotional meaning of music, little is known about other aspects of listeners' experience of music. The present study investigated the neural correlates of the iconic meaning of music. Event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded while a group of 20 music majors and a group of 20 non-music majors performed a lexical decision task in the context of implicit musical iconic meaning priming. ERP analysis revealed a significant N400 effect of congruency in time window 260-510 ms following the onset of the target word only in the group of music majors. Time-course analysis using 50 ms windows indicated significant N400 effects both within the time window 410-460 ms and 460-510 ms for music majors, whereas only a partial N400 effect during time window 410-460 ms was observed for non-music majors. There was also a trend for the N400 effects in the music major group to be stronger than those in the non-major group in the sub-windows of 310-360 ms and 410-460 ms. Especially in the sub-window of 410-460 ms, the topographical map of the difference waveforms between congruent and incongruent conditions revealed different N400 distribution between groups; the effect was concentrated in bilateral frontal areas for music majors, but in central-parietal areas for non-music majors. These results imply probable neural mechanism differences underlying automatic iconic meaning priming of music. Our findings suggest that processing of the iconic meaning of music can be accomplished automatically and that musical training may facilitate the understanding of the iconic meaning of music.