Abstract
Although there has been extensive research on the processing of the emotional meaning of music, little is known about other aspects of listeners’ experience of music. The present study investigated the neural correlates of the iconic meaning of music. Event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded while a group of 20 music majors and a group of 20 non-music majors performed a lexical decision task in the context of implicit musical iconic meaning priming. ERP analysis revealed a significant N400 effect of congruency in time window 260-510 ms following the onset of the target word only in the group of music majors. Time-course analysis using 50 ms windows indicated significant N400 effects both within the time window 410-460 ms and 460-510 ms for music majors, whereas only a partial N400 effect during time window 410-460 ms was observed for non-music majors. There was also a trend for the N400 effects in the music major group to be stronger than those in the non-major group in the sub-windows of 310-360ms and 410-460ms. Especially in the sub-window of 410-460 ms, the topographical map of the difference waveforms between congruent and incongruent conditions revealed different N400 distribution between groups; the effect was concentrated in bilateral frontal areas for music majors, but in central-parietal areas for non-music majors. These results imply probable neural mechanism differences underlying automatic iconic meaning priming of music. Our findings suggest that processing of the iconic meaning of music can be accomplished automatically and that musical training may facilitate the understanding of the iconic meaning of music.
Highlights
As language, music is claimed to be able to convey meaningful information
In most of the electrodes, Event-related potentials (ERP) elicited from target words in both conditions began a negative-going N400 component at around 260 ms and lasted to 510 ms after target onset
To illustrate the time course changes in N400, a separate repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed for each 50 ms sub-window
Summary
Music is claimed to be able to convey meaningful information. The musical meaning mainly comprises two dimensions: emotional meaning, and iconic meaning [1,2,3,4]. Recent research has focused on exploring the mechanism by which the emotional meaning of music is understood [5,6,7,8]. The priming paradigm has been widely adopted in previous studies, with the presentation of a specific segment of music containing emotional information preceding target words of corresponding emotional meanings. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0132169 July 10, 2015
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