Bidirectional Interactions Between Language and Music in a Dual Task Experiment Without Syntactic Violations

To investigate potentially shared syntactic mechanisms between language and music, we conducted a novel adaptation of the dual task paradigm without syntactic violations to assess the degree of bidirectional interaction between the two domains. Participants listened to music progressions while reading natural language sentences, and were then asked to provide, in randomized order, music closure judgments and language comprehension answers. We manipulated both language and music stimuli in terms of their syntactic structural complexity and syntactic working memory demands based on nonlocal dependencies between words or chords. We discovered a bidirectional yet unbalanced pattern of cross-domain interaction whereby language exerted relatively more influences over music than vice versa, apparently resulting mostly from syntactic structural complexity instead of syntactic working memory demands, although we discuss the possibility that alternative heuristic strategies may have been employed during concurrent, resource-demanding processes. We also found that cross-domain interactions were often most prominent when syntactically critical words and keys temporally coincided across sequences. These results provide new evidence in support of theoretical models of shared resources between language and music.