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Updated: Oct 24, 2025
Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Processes in Visual Word Recognition using Electrophysiology
Published on: June 29, 2021
The impact of musical expertise on anticipatory semantic processing during online speech comprehension: An
Yuanyi Zheng1, Zitong Zhao1, Xiaohong Yang1
1CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China; Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100149, China.
Abstract:
Musical experience has been found to aid speech perception. This electroencephalography study further examined whether and how musical expertise affects high-level predictive semantic processing in speech comprehension. Musicians and non-musicians listened to semantically strongly/weakly constraining sentences, with each sentence being primed by a congruent/incongruent sentence-prosody. At the target nouns, a N400 reduction effect (strongly vs. weakly constraining) was observed in both groups, with the onset-latency of this effect being delayed for incongruent (vs. congruent) priming. At the transitive verbs preceding these target nouns, musicians' event-related-potential amplitude (in incongruent-priming) and beta-band oscillatory power (in congruent- and incongruent-priming) showed a semantic-constraint effect, and were correlated with the predictability of incoming nouns; non-musicians only demonstrated an event-related-potential semantic-constraint effect, which was correlated with the predictability of current verbs. These results indicate musical expertise enhances semantic prediction tendency in speech comprehension, and this effect might be not just an aftereffect of facilitated acoustic/phonological processing.
