Music speaks louder than lyrics: a conceptual priming experiment

Although the processing of language and music are thought to be related, the semantic interplay of these domains in song remains relatively unexplored. This study investigates how music and lyrics contribute to conceptual meaning-making in song interpretation using a conceptual priming experiment.

Fifty participants completed a lexical decision task in which target words were semantically related either to the music or to the lyrics of an ecologically valid song prime. Reaction times were used to infer semantic alignment.

The results showed significantly faster responses to target words associated with the music than to those associated with the lyrics of the prime. This effect remained significant even after controlling for various properties of the primes and targets, which had been assessed by an additional 234 participants in complementary studies prior to the priming experiment. We also found a significant interaction between target type (music- vs. lyrics-related) and the Euclidean distance of valence and arousal between the prime and target: affective distance predicted reaction times only for music-derived targets. Ratings from the complementary studies indicated that music evoked more positive and arousing responses than lyrics, while lyrics appeared to dampen the affective intensity of musical excerpts. Our findings challenge the assumption of tight integration between melody and lyrics in song processing. They suggest that music and language contribute unequally to conceptual interpretation in song, with music playing a more dominant role. These results offer new insights into the construction of multi-modal meanings and the cognitive mechanisms underlying song comprehension.