The interaction of language and music: a psycholinguistic approach for a shared pitch mechanism (?)

Abstract

Over the last decades, there has been an increasing interest in the cognitive interaction between language and music. Previous research has focused on investigating potential underlying processes shared by the two domains. While some studies do not support such a connection when examining linguistic and music pitch, there seems to be a consensus concerning the existence of structural rule parallels, essential to the linguistic and musical adequacy. The present study focuses on the role of a non-linguistic acoustic cue, such as a high/neutral or low music pitch note, to investigate whether it affects the phrase word boundaries on garden-path sentences in Greek, leading to the elevation of garden-path effects, similarly to what has been suggested for rising intonation. Through a self-paced reading-listening experiment where word segments are accompanied by music pitch notes, our results showed significant ambiguity resolution effects for both high and low music pitch. We interpret the obtained data as an indication of an interaction between language and music, where general (random) sound signals may facilitate linguistic processing.