Abstract:  Musical syntax refers to a set of regularities which organize discrete elements into musical sequence. Musical syntactic processing is affected by both music structures and listeners’ personal characteristics. The current article focuses on several factors which have been discussed extensively in these years, including dependency distance, musical temporal structure, listeners’ age and musical expertise. Future research should explore musical syntactic integration within different distances, clarify when and how syntactic processing is influenced by musical temporal structure, examine the effects of heredity and environment on musical syntactic processing, and investigate how these factors are combined to influence musical syntactic processing.

Key words: syntactic processing in music, dependency distance, temporal structure, age, musical expertise