Abstract:

Music and language are the two most important sign systems for human beings. Similar to language, music is also constructed on certain syntactic rules. Although evidence has shown that listeners are sensitive to musical syntax, the underlying cognitive mechanism and its influencing factors are still unknown. Therefore, we intend to further explore the role of prediction and integration in musical syntactic processing, as well as the impact of musical hierarchical and temporal structures on musical syntactic processing. We expect the proposed studies to further reveal the nature of musical syntactic processing, and to provide empirical evidence for the comparison between music and language and the exploration of human general communication mechanism.

Key words: musical syntax, hierarchical structures, temporal structures, cognitive mechanism, neural mechanisms