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Updated: Mar 23, 2026

fMRI Mapping of Brain Activity Associated with the Vocal Production of Consonant and Dissonant Intervals
Published on: May 23, 2017
Language influences music harmony perception: effects of shared syntactic integration resources beyond attention
Richard Kunert1, Roel M Willems1, Peter Hagoort1
1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, PO Box 310, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9010, 6500 GL Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Abstract:
Many studies have revealed shared music-language processing resources by finding an influence of music harmony manipulations on concurrent language processing. However, the nature of the shared resources has remained ambiguous. They have been argued to be syntax specific and thus due to shared syntactic integration resources. An alternative view regards them as related to general attention and, thus, not specific to syntax. The present experiments evaluated these accounts by investigating the influence of language on music. Participants were asked to provide closure judgements on harmonic sequences in order to assess the appropriateness of sequence endings. At the same time participants read syntactic garden-path sentences. Closure judgements revealed a change in harmonic processing as the result of reading a syntactically challenging word. We found no influence of an arithmetic control manipulation (experiment 1) or semantic garden-path sentences (experiment 2). Our results provide behavioural evidence for a specific influence of linguistic syntax processing on musical harmony judgements. A closer look reveals that the shared resources appear to be needed to hold a harmonic key online in some form of syntactic working memory or unification workspace related to the integration of chords and words. Overall, our results support the syntax specificity of shared music-language processing resources.
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