Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was associated or not. Violations of discourse congruence had early and lingering effects on ERP and eye-tracking measures. This indicates that discourse representations have a rapid effect on lexical semantic processing even in locally congruous texts. In contrast, effects of association were more malleable: Very early effects of associative priming were only robust when the discourse context was absent or not cohesive. Together these results suggest that the global discourse model quickly influences lexical processing in sentences, and that spreading activation from associative priming does not contribute to natural reading in discourse contexts.

Adult non-native speech perception is subject to influence from multiple factors, including linguistic and extralinguistic experience such as musical training. The present research examines how linguistic and musical factors influence non-native word identification and lexical tone perception. Groups of native tone language (Thai) and non-tone language listeners (English), each subdivided into musician and non-musician groups, engaged in Cantonese tone word training. Participants learned to identify words minimally distinguished by five Cantonese tones during training, also completing musical aptitude and phonemic tone identification tasks. First, the findings suggest that either musical experience or a tone language background leads to significantly better non-native word learning proficiency, as compared to those with neither musical training nor tone language experience. Moreover, the combination of tone language and musical experience did not provide an additional advantage for Thai musicians above and beyond either experience alone. Musicianship was found to be more advantageous than a tone language background for tone identification. Finally, tone identification and musical aptitude scores were significantly correlated with word learning success for English but not Thai listeners. These findings point to a dynamic influence of musical and linguistic experience, both at the tone dentification level and at the word learning stage.

AbstractRecent work shows that word segmentation is influenced by distal prosodic characteristics of the input several syllables from the segmentation point (Dilley & McAuley, 2008). Here, participants heard eight-syllable sequences with a lexically ambiguous four-syllable ending (e.g., crisis turnip vs. cry sister nip). The prosodic characteristics of the initial five syllables were resynthesized in a manner predicted to favor parsing of the final syllables as either a monosyllabic or a disyllabic word; the acoustic characteristics of the final three syllables were held constant. Experiments 1a–c replicated earlier results showing that utterance-initial prosody influences segmentation utterance-finally, even when lexical content is removed through low-pass filtering, and even when an on-line cross-modal paradigm is used. Experiments 2 and 3 pitted distal prosody against, respectively, distal semantic context and prosodic attributes of the test words themselves. Although these factors jointly affected which words participants heard, distal prosody remained an extremely robust segmentation cue. These findings suggest that distal prosody is a powerful factor for consideration in models of word segmentation and lexical access.]]>

In the present study, two experiments were carried out to investigate the time course of spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese using both event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral measures. To address the hypothesis that there is an early phonological processing stage independent of semantics during spoken word recognition, a unimodal word-matching paradigm was employed, in which both prime and target words were presented auditorily. Experiment 1 manipulated the phonological relations between disyllabic primes and targets, and found an enhanced P2 (200-270 ms post-target onset) as well as a smaller early N400 to word-initial phonological mismatches over fronto-central scalp sites. Experiment 2 manipulated both phonological and semantic relations between monosyllabic primes and targets, and replicated the phonological mismatch-associated P2, which was not modulated by semantic relations. Overall, these results suggest that P2 is a sensitive electrophysiological index of early phonological processing independent of semantics in Mandarin Chinese spoken word recognition.

Here, we applied a multi-feature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm in order to systematically investigate the neuronal representation of vowels and temporally manipulated CV syllables in a homogeneous sample of string players and non-musicians. Based on previous work indicating an increased sensitivity of the musicians' auditory system, we expected to find that musically trained subjects will elicit increased MMN amplitudes in response to temporal variations in CV syllables, namely voice-onset time (VOT) and duration. In addition, since different vowels are principally distinguished by means of frequency information and musicians are superior in extracting tonal (and thus frequency) information from an acoustic stream, we also expected to provide evidence for an increased auditory representation of vowels in the experts. In line with our hypothesis, we could show that musicians are not only advantaged in the pre-attentive encoding of temporal speech cues, but most notably also in processing vowels. Additional

This study examined Mandarin tone identification by 36 English-speaking musicians and 36 nonmusicians and musical note identification by the musicians. In the Mandarin task, participants were given a brief tutorial on Mandarin tones and identified the tones of the syllable sa produced by 32 speakers. The stimuli included intact syllables and acoustically modified syllables with limited F0 information. Acoustic analyses showed considerable overlap in F0 range among the tones due to the presence of multiple speakers. Despite no prior experience with Mandarin, the musicians identified intact tones at 68% and silent-center tones at 54% correct, both exceeding chance (25%). The musicians also outperformed the nonmusicians, who identified intact tones at 44% and silent-center tones at 36% correct. These results indicate musical training facilitated lexical tone identification, although the facilitation varied as a function of tone and the type of acoustic input. In the music task, the musicians listened to synthesized musical notes of three timbres and identified the notes without a reference pitch. Average identification accuracy was at chance level even when multiple semitone errors were allowed. Since none of the musicians possessed absolute pitch, the role of absolute pitch in Mandarin tone identification remains inconclusive.

The present work investigates the relationship between semantic and prosodic (metric) processing in spoken language under 2 attentional conditions (semantic and metric tasks) by analyzing both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) data. Participants listened to short sentences ending in semantically and/or metrically congruous or incongruous trisyllabic words. In the metric task, ERP data showed that metrically incongruous words elicited both larger early negative and late positive components than metrically congruous words, thereby demonstrating the online processing of the metric structure of words. Moreover, in the semantic task, metrically incongruous words also elicited an early negative component with similar latency and scalp distribution as the classical N400 component. This finding highlights the automaticity of metrical structure processing. Moreover, it demonstrates that violations of a word's metric structure may hinder lexical access and word comprehension. This interpretation is supported by the behavioral data showing that participants made more errors for semantically congruous but metrically incongruous words when they were attending to the semantic aspects of the sentence. Finally, the finding of larger N400 components to semantically incongruous than congruous words, in both the semantic and metric tasks, suggests that the N400 component reflects automatic aspects of semantic processing.

The present study aimed to examine the influence of musical expertise on the metric and semantic aspects of speech processing. In two attentional conditions (metric and semantic tasks), musicians listened to short sentences ending in trisyllabic words that were semantically and/or metrically congruous or incongruous. Both ERPs and behavioral data were analyzed and the results were compared to previous nonmusicians' data. Regarding the processing of meter, results showed that musical expertise influenced the automatic detection of the syllable temporal structure (P200 effect), the integration of metric structure and its influence on word comprehension (N400 effect), as well as the reanalysis of metric violations (P600 and late positivities effects). By contrast, results showed that musical expertise did not influence the semantic level of processing. These results are discussed in terms of transfer of training effects from music to speech processing.

The aim of this study was to determine whether musical expertise influences the detection of pitch variations in a foreign language that participants did not understand. To this end, French adults, musicians and nonmusicians, were presented with sentences spoken in Portuguese. The final words of the sentences were prosodically congruous (spoken at normal pitch height) or incongruous (pitch was increased by 35% or 120%). Results showed that when the pitch deviations were small and difficult to detect (35%: weak prosodic incongruities), the level of performance was higher for musicians than for nonmusicians. Moreover, analysis of the time course of pitch processing, as revealed by the event-related brain potentials to the prosodically congruous and incongruous sentence-final words, showed that musicians were, on average, 300 msec faster than nonmusicians to categorize prosodically congruous and incongruous endings. These results are in line with previous ones showing that musical expertise, by increasing discrimination of pitch--a basic acoustic parameter equally important for music and speech prosody--does facilitate the processing of pitch variations not only in music but also in language. Finally, comparison with previous results [Schon, D., Magne, C., & Besson, M. The music of speech: Music training facilitates pitch processing in both music and language. Psychophysiology, 41, 341-349, 2004] points to the influence of semantics on the perception of acoustic prosodic cues.

The main focus of this study was to examine the relationship between musical aptitude and second language pronunciation skills. We investigated whether children with superior performance in foreign language production represent musical sound features more readily in the preattentive level of neural processing compared with children with less-advanced production skills. Sound processing accuracy was examined in elementary school children by means of event-related potential (ERP) recordings and behavioral measures. Children with good linguistic skills had better musical skills as measured by the Seashore musicality test than children with less accurate linguistic skills. The ERP data accompany the results of the behavioral tests: children with good linguistic skills showed more pronounced sound-change evoked activation with the music stimuli than children with less accurate linguistic skills. Taken together, the results imply that musical and linguistic skills could partly be based on shared neural mechanisms.

A morphosyntactic agreement violation during reading elicits a well-documented biphasic ERP pattern (LAN+P600). The cognitive variables that affect both the amplitude of the two components and the topography of the anterior negativity are still debated. We studied the ERP correlates of the violation of a specific agreement feature based on the phonology of the critical word. This was compared with the violation of a lexical feature, namely grammatical gender. These two features are different both in the level of representation involved in the agreement computation and in terms of their role in establishing structural relations with possible following constituents. The ERP pattern elicited by the two agreement violations showed interesting dissociations. The LAN was distributed ventrally for both types of violation, but showed a central extension for the gender violation. The P600 showed an amplitude modulation: this component was larger for phonotactic violations in its late time window (700-900 ms). The former result is indicative of a difference in the brain structures recruited for the processing of violations at different levels of representation. The P600 effect is interpreted assuming a hierarchical relation among features that forces a deeper reanalysis of the violation involving a word form property. Finally the two features elicit distinct end-of-sentence wrap-up effects, consistent with the different roles they play in the processing of the whole sentence.

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Musicians have a variety of perceptual and cortical specializations compared to non-musicians. Recent studies have shown that potentials evoked from primarily brainstem structures are enhanced in musicians, compared to non-musicians. Specifically, musicians have more robust representations of pitch periodicity and faster neural timing to sound onset when listening to sounds or both listening to and viewing a speaker. However, it is not known whether musician-related enhancements at the subcortical level are correlated with specializations in the cortex. Does musical training shape the auditory system in a coordinated manner or in disparate ways at cortical and subcortical levels? To answer this question, we recorded simultaneous brainstem and cortical evoked responses in musician and non-musician subjects. Brainstem response periodicity was related to early cortical response timing across all subjects, and this relationship was stronger in musicians. Peaks of the brainstem response evoked by sound onset and timbre cues were also related to cortical timing. Neurophysiological measures at both levels correlated with musical skill scores across all subjects. In addition, brainstem and cortical measures correlated with the age musicians began their training and the years of musical practice. Taken together, these data imply that neural representations of pitch, timing and timbre cues and cortical response timing are shaped in a coordinated manner, and indicate corticofugal modulation of subcortical afferent circuitry.

Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects the processing of musical pitch in speakers of non-tonal languages like English and French. We assessed whether this musical disorder exists among speakers of Mandarin Chinese who use pitch to alter the meaning of words. Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, we tested 117 healthy young Mandarin speakers with no self-declared musical problems and 22 individuals who reported musical difficulties and scored two standard deviations below the mean obtained by the Mandarin speakers without amusia. These 22 amusic individuals showed a similar pattern of musical impairment as did amusic speakers of non-tonal languages, by exhibiting a more pronounced deficit in melody than in rhythm processing. Furthermore, nearly half the tested amusics had impairments in the discrimination and identification of Mandarin lexical tones. Six showed marked impairments, displaying what could be called lexical tone agnosia, but had normal tone production. Our results show that speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin may experience musical pitch disorder despite early exposure to speech-relevant pitch contrasts. The observed association between the musical disorder and lexical tone difficulty indicates that the pitch disorder as defining congenital amusia is not specific to music or culture but is rather general in nature.

We studied whether a multifeature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm using naturally produced speech stimuli is feasible for studies of auditory discrimination accuracy of adult participants. A naturally produced trisyllabic pseudoword was used in the paradigm, and MMNs were recorded to changes that were acoustic (changes in fundamental frequency or intensity) or potentially phonological (changes in vowel identity or vowel duration). All the different changes were presented in three different word segments (initial, middle, or final syllable). All changes elicited an MMN response, but the vowel duration change elicited a different response pattern than the other deviant types. Changes in vowel duration and identity also had an effect on MMN lateralization. Our results show that assessing speech sound discrimination of several features in word context is possible in a short recording time (30 min) with the multifeature paradigm.

The comparative study of music and language is drawing an increasing amount of research interest. Like language, music is a human universal involving perceptually discrete elements organized into hierarchically structured sequences. Music and language can thus serve as foils for each other in the study of brain mechanisms underlying complex sound processing, and comparative research can provide novel insights into the functional and neural architecture of both domains. This review focuses on syntax, using recent neuroimaging data and cognitive theory to propose a specific point of convergence between syntactic processing in language and music. This leads to testable predictions, including the prediction that that syntactic comprehension problems in Broca's aphasia are not selective to language but influence music perception as well.

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Musicologists and linguists have often suggested that the prosody of a culture's spoken language can influence the structure of its instrumental music. However, empirical data supporting this idea have been lacking. This has been partly due to the difficulty of developing and applying comparable quantitative measures to melody and rhythm in speech and music. This study uses a recently-developed measure for the study of speech rhythm to compare rhythmic patterns in English and French language and classical music. We find that English and French musical themes are significantly different in this measure of rhythm, which also differentiates the rhythm of spoken English and French. Thus, there is an empirical basis for the claim that spoken prosody leaves an imprint on the music of a culture.

To explore the relationship between the processing of melodic and rhythmic patterns in speech and music, we tested the prosodic and musical discrimination abilities of two

The processing of phonological and semantic word attributes has been commonly explored with electrophysiological methods using simple contexts where competition between features is eliminated. Conversely, the interaction between phonological and semantic attributes has not been systematically examined. We therefore recorded an event-related electrophysiological marker of word discordance, the N400, in response to sequences of auditory word pairs containing semantic incongruences, phonological discordances, or a mixture of the two. N400 enhancement to semantically unrelated words was systematically observed, whether the subjects heard the sequences passively (no instruction) or actively (semantic judgement task), and even in contexts where the task did not concern semantic attributes. In contrast, the N400 effect to phonologically unrelated (non-rhyming) words was exclusively obtained in the active situation (phonological judgment), while it disappeared in passive conditions and during semantic/phonological interference. This suggests that the detection of semantic incongruences is a more robust and automatized mechanism than that of phonological ones, and tends to occlude this latter when both features are in competition. Our data also provide new elements supporting the persistence of the semantic N400 during 'shallow' word processing tasks, i.e. tasks that discourage analysis of semantic aspects of the words.

We report 3 experiments exploring the responsiveness of the auditory N400 event-related potential to the phonological relations between word or non-word targets and preceding prime words. When subjects had to decide whether primes and targets rhymed, non-rhyming words produced greater negativity in the N400 time range than rhyming words. The same effect was obtained when these targets were spoken by another voice than the prime words, suggesting that the effect is determined by phonological factors, and not merely by a physical-acoustic mismatch (Experiment 1). In the rhyming task, the differential N400 for non-rhyming vs. rhyming words was equally pronounced for non-rhyming vs. rhyming non-words (Experiment 2). In a lexical decision task on the same stimuli, a difference between non-rhyming and rhyming targets was obtained for words, but not for non-words (Experiment 3). The results show that the auditory N400 is sensitive to phonological variables. It is further proposed that phonological effects on the auditory N400 are not manifestations unique to phonological processes that demand conscious attention, but may also reflect operations that are performed automatically during auditory word recognition.

With practice, people become better at discriminating two similar stimuli, such as two sounds. The neural mechanisms that underlie this type of learning have been of interest to researchers investigating neural plasticity associated with learning and recovery of function following stroke. We utilized event related potentials (ERP) to study the neural substrates underlying auditory discrimination learning. Stimuli were five steady-state American English vowels. On each trial, participants were presented with a pair of vowels created by summing together the digital waveforms of two different vowels. Listeners were instructed to identify both vowels in the pair. ERPs were recorded during two sessions separated by 1 week. Half of the participants practised the discrimination task during the intervening week while the other half served as controls and did not receive any training. Trained listeners showed greater improvement in accuracy than untrained participants. In both groups, vowels generated N1 and P2 waves at the fronto-central and temporal scalp regions. The behavioral effects of training were paralleled by decreased N1 and P2 latencies as well as enhanced P2 amplitude in the trained compared with untrained listeners. The effects of training on sensory evoked responses are consistent with the proposal that perceptual learning is associated with changes in sensory cortices.

The present event-related potential (ERP) study examined the role of tone and segmental information in Cantonese word processing. To this end, participants listened to sentences that were either semantically correct or contained a semantically incorrect word. Semantically incorrect words differed from the most expected sentence completion at the tone level, at the segmental level, or at both levels. All semantically incorrect words elicited an increased frontal negativity that was maximal 300 msec following word onset and an increased centroparietal positivity that was maximal 650 msec following word onset. There were differences between completely incongruous words and the other two violation conditions with respect to the latency and amplitude of the ERP effects. These differences may be due to differences in the onset of acoustic deviation of the presented from the expected word and different mechanisms involved in the processing of complete as compared to partial acoustic deviations. Most importantly, however, tonally and segmentally induced semantic violations were comparable. This suggests that listeners access tone and segmental information at a similar point in time and that both types of information play comparable roles during word processing in Cantonese.

The main aim of the present experiment was to determine whether extensive musical training facilitates pitch contour processing not only in music but also in language. We used a parametric manipulation of final notes' or words' fundamental frequency (F0), and we recorded behavioral and electrophysiological data to examine the precise time course of pitch processing. We compared professional musicians and nonmusicians. Results revealed that within both domains, musicians detected weak F0 manipulations better than nonmusicians. Moreover, F0 manipulations within both music and language elicited similar variations in brain electrical potentials, with overall shorter onset latency for musicians than for nonmusicians. Finally, the scalp distribution of an early negativity in the linguistic task varied with musical expertise, being largest over temporal sites bilaterally for musicians and largest centrally and over left temporal sites for nonmusicians. These results are taken as evidence that extensive musical training influences the perception of pitch contour in spoken language.

P2 and N1c components of the auditory evoked potential (AEP) have been shown to be sensitive to remodeling of the auditory cortex by training at pitch discrimination in nonmusician subjects. Here, we investigated whether these neuroplastic components of the AEP are enhanced in musicians in accordance with their musical training histories. Highly skilled violinists and pianists and nonmusician controls listened under conditions of passive attention to violin tones, piano tones, and pure tones matched in fundamental frequency to the musical tones. Compared with nonmusician controls, both musician groups evidenced larger N1c (latency, 138 msec) and P2 (latency, 185 msec) responses to the three types of tonal stimuli. As in training studies with nonmusicians, N1c enhancement was expressed preferentially in the right hemisphere, where auditory neurons may be specialized for processing of spectral pitch. Equivalent current dipoles fitted to the N1c and P2 field patterns localized to spatially differentiable regions of the secondary auditory cortex, in agreement with previous findings. These results suggest that the tuning properties of neurons are modified in distributed regions of the auditory cortex in accordance with the acoustic training history (musical- or laboratory-based) of the subject. Enhanced P2 and N1c responses in musicians need not be considered genetic or prenatal markers for musical skill.

We investigated whether N1 and P2 auditory-evoked responses are modulated by the spectral complexity of musical sounds in pianists and non-musicians. Study participants were presented with three variants of a C4 piano tone equated for temporal envelope but differing in the number of harmonics contained in the stimulus. A fourth tone was a pure tone matched to the fundamental frequency of the piano tones. A simultaneous electroencephalographic/magnetoencephalographic recording was made. P2 amplitude was larger in musicians and increased with spectral complexity preferentially in this group, but N1 did not. The results suggest that P2 reflects the specific features of acoustic stimuli experienced during musical practice and point to functional differences in P2 and N1 that relate to their underlying mechanisms.

A growing body of research suggests that musical experience and ability are related to a variety of cognitive abilities, including executive functioning (EF). However, it is not yet clear if these relationships are limited to specific components of EF, limited to auditory tasks, or reflect very general cognitive advantages. This study investigated the existence and generality of the relationship between musical ability and EFs by evaluating the musical experience and ability of a large group of participants and investigating whether this predicts individual differences on three different components of EF - inhibition, updating, and switching - in both auditory and visual modalities. Musical ability predicted better performance on both auditory and visual updating tasks, even when controlling for a variety of potential confounds (age, handedness, bilingualism, and socio-economic status). However, musical ability was not clearly related to inhibitory control and was unrelated to switching performance. These data thus show that cognitive advantages associated with musical ability are not limited to auditory processes, but are limited to specific aspects of EF. This supports a process-specific (but modality-general) relationship between musical ability and non-musical aspects of cognition.

Training during a sensitive period in development may have greater effects on brain structure and behavior than training later in life. Musicians are an excellent model for investigating sensitive periods because training starts early and can be quantified. Previous studies suggested that early training might be related to greater amounts of white matter in the corpus callosum, but did not control for length of training or identify behavioral correlates of structural change. The current study compared white-matter organization using diffusion tensor imaging in early- and late-trained musicians matched for years of training and experience. We found that early-trained musicians had greater connectivity in the posterior midbody/isthmus of the corpus callosum and that fractional anisotropy in this region was related to age of onset of training and sensorimotor synchronization performance. We propose that training before the age of 7 years results in changes in white-matter connectivity that may serve as a scaffold upon which ongoing experience can build.

Spoken language, in contrast to written text, provides prosodic information such as rhythm, pauses, accents, amplitude and pitch variations. However, little is known about when and how these features are used by the listener to interpret the speech signal. Here we use event-related brain potentials (ERP) to demonstrate that intonational phrasing guides the initial analysis of sentence structure. Our finding of a positive shift in the ERP at intonational phrase boundaries suggests a specific on-line brain response to prosodic processing. Additional ERP components indicate that a false prosodic boundary is sufficient to mislead the listener's sentence processor. Thus, the application of ERP measures is a promising approach for revealing the time course and neural basis of prosodic information processing.

Music and speech share many sound attributes. Pitch, as the percept of fundamental frequency, often occupies the center of researchers' attention in studies on the relationship between music and speech. One widely held assumption is that music experience may confer an advantage in speech tone processing. The cross-domain effects of musical training on non-tonal language speakers' linguistic pitch processing have been relatively well established. However, it remains unclear whether musical experience improves the processing of lexical tone for native tone language speakers who actually use lexical tones in their daily communication. Using a passive oddball paradigm, the present study revealed that among Mandarin speakers, musicians demonstrated enlarged electrical responses to lexical tone changes as reflected by the increased mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitudes, as well as faster behavioral discrimination performance compared with age- and IQ-matched nonmusicians. The current results suggest that in spite of the preexisting long-term experience with lexical tones in both musicians and nonmusicians, musical experience can still modulate the cortical plasticity of linguistic tone processing and is associated with enhanced neural processing of speech tones. Our current results thus provide the first electrophysiological evidence supporting the notion that pitch expertise in the music domain may indeed be transferable to the speech domain even for native tone language speakers.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether the N1-P2 complex reflects training-induced changes in neural activity associated with improved voice-onset-time (VOT) perception. DESIGN: Auditory cortical evoked potentials N1 and P2 were obtained from 10 normal-hearing young adults in response to two synthetic speech variants of the syllable /ba/. Using a repeated measures design, subjects were tested before and after training both behaviorally and neurophysiologically to determine whether there were training-related changes. In between pre- and post-testing sessions, subjects were trained to distinguish the -20 and -10 msec VOT /ba/ syllables as being different from each other. Two stimulus presentation rates were used during electrophysiologic testing (390 msec and 910 msec interstimulus interval). RESULTS: Before training, subjects perceived both the -20 msec and -10 msec VOT stimuli as /ba/. Through training, subjects learned to identify the -20 msec VOT stimulus as

Music and speech are very cognitively demanding auditory phenomena generally attributed to cortical rather than subcortical circuitry. We examined brainstem encoding of linguistic pitch and found that musicians show more robust and faithful encoding compared with nonmusicians. These results not only implicate a common subcortical manifestation for two presumed cortical functions, but also a possible reciprocity of corticofugal speech and music tuning, providing neurophysiological explanations for musicians' higher language-learning ability.

Although musical training has been shown to facilitate both native and non-native phonetic perception, it remains unclear whether and how musical experience affects native speakers' categorical perception (CP) of speech at the suprasegmental level. Using both identification and discrimination tasks, this study compared Chinese-speaking musicians and non-musicians in their CP of a lexical tone continuum (from the high level tone, Tone1 to the high falling tone, Tone4). While the identification functions showed similar steepness and boundary location between the two subject groups, the discrimination results revealed superior performance in the musicians for discriminating within-category stimuli pairs but not for between-category stimuli. These findings suggest that musical training can enhance sensitivity to subtle pitch differences between within-category sounds in the presence of robust mental representations in service of CP of lexical tonal contrasts.

Current research on music processing and syntax or semantics in language suggests that music and language share partially overlapping neural resources. Pitch also constitutes a common denominator, forming melody in music and prosody in language. Further, pitch perception is modulated by musical training. The present study investigated how music and language interact on pitch dimension and whether musical training plays a role in this interaction. For this purpose, we used melodies ending on an expected or unexpected note (melodic expectancy being estimated by a computational model) paired with prosodic utterances which were either expected (statements with falling pitch) or relatively unexpected (questions with rising pitch). Participants' (22 musicians, 20 nonmusicians) ERPs and behavioural responses in a statement/question discrimination task were recorded. Participants were faster for simultaneous expectancy violations in the melodic and linguistic stimuli. Further, musicians performed better than nonmusicians, which may be related to their increased pitch tracking ability. At the neural level, prosodic violations elicited a front-central positive ERP around 150ms after the onset of the last word/note, while musicians presented reduced P600 in response to strong incongruities (questions on low-probability notes). Critically, musicians' P800 amplitudes were proportional to their level of musical training, suggesting that expertise might shape the pitch processing of language. The beneficial aspect of expertise could be attributed to its strengthening effect of general executive functions. These findings offer novel contributions to our understanding of shared higher-order mechanisms between music and language processing on pitch dimension, and further demonstrate a potential modulation by musical expertise.