EEG Correlates of Song Prosody: A New Look at the Relationship between Linguistic and Musical Rhythm

Song composers incorporate linguistic prosody into their music when setting words to melody, a process called “textsetting.” Composers tend to align the expected stress of the lyrics with strong metrical positions in the music. The present study was designed to explore the idea that temporal alignment helps listeners to better understand song lyrics by directing listeners’ attention to instances where strong syllables occur on strong beats. Three types of textsettings were created by aligning metronome clicks with all, some or none of the strong syllables in sung sentences. Electroencephalographic recordings were taken while participants listened to the sung sentences (primes) and performed a lexical decision task on subsequent words and pseudowords (targets, presented visually). Comparison of misaligned and well-aligned sentences showed that temporal alignment between strong/weak syllables and strong/weak musical beats were associated with modulations of induced beta and evoked gamma power, which have been shown to fluctuate with rhythmic expectancies. Furthermore, targets that followed well-aligned primes elicited greater induced alpha and beta activity, and better lexical decision task performance, compared with targets that followed misaligned and varied sentences. Overall, these findings suggest that alignment of linguistic stress and musical meter in song enhances musical beat tracking and comprehension of lyrics by synchronizing neural activity with strong syllables. This approach may begin to explain the mechanisms underlying the relationship between linguistic and musical rhythm in songs, and how rhythmic attending facilitates learning and recall of song lyrics. Moreover, the observations reported here coincide with a growing number of studies reporting interactions between the linguistic and musical dimensions of song, which likely stem from shared neural resources for processing music and speech

0274: Prognostic impact of pulmonary arterial pressure in patients with aortic stenosis and preserved left ventricular ejection fraction

BackgroundThe prognostic impact of pulmonary arterial pressure (PAP) remains controversial in aortic stenosis (AS) and few studies focused only on patients with preserved left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). We therefore aimed to investigate the impact of PAP, derived from our large catheterization database, on survival in severe AS with preserved LVEF.Methods and resultsBetween 2000 and 2010, 749 patients (74±8y, 57% of males) with preserved LVEF and severe AS without other valvular heart disease underwent cardiac catheterization, including right heart hemodynamic assessment. Pulmonary hypertension (PH) was defined as mean PAP>25mmHg.Systolic and mean PAP were 34.5±12 and 21.9±9mmHg, respectively. Overall, 29% (n=215) of patients had PH, and these patients were significantly older (p<0.0001), with lower LVEF (p<0.0001) and higher heart rate (p=0.016) than those without PH. In addition, they more frequently had, hypertension (p<0.0001), diabetes (p=0.001), coronary artery disease (CAD, p<0.0001) and chronic pulmonary disease (p=0.043). Aortic valve replacement (AVR) was performed in 91% of patients and 30-day mortality was 4.3%, significantly higher in patients with PH (7.7 vs. 3.4%, p=0.014). In logistic regression analysis, after adjustment for age, gender, LVEF, CAD and mean transaortic pressure gradient, mean PAP was an independent predictor of increased 30-day mortality (OR=1.06, 95% CI: 1.02-1.1, p=0.004). Overall long-term survival was significantly reduced in patients with PH as compared to those without PH (10-year survival: 41±8 vs. 61±3%, p<0.0001). In multivariate analysis, after adjustment for all cofactors, PH was an independent predictor of mortality (HR=1.5, 95% CI: 1.1-2.1, p=0.037).ConclusionIn patients with severe AS and preserved LVEF, PAP is an independent predictor of both 30-day and long-term mortality. In order to improve the prognosis of these patients, AVR could be considered before the occurrence of severely elevated PAP

Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis (“TOPsy”): Psychometric Validation of a Brief Scalable Test of Lexical Stress Perception

Prosody perception is fundamental to spoken language communication as it supports comprehension, pragmatics, morphosyntactic parsing of speech streams, and phonological awareness. A particular aspect of prosody: perceptual sensitivity to speech rhythm patterns in words (i.e., lexical stress sensitivity), is also a robust predictor of reading skills, though it has received much less attention than phonological awareness in the literature. Given the importance of prosody and reading in educational outcomes, reliable and valid tools are needed to conduct large-scale health and genetic investigations of individual differences in prosody, as groundwork for investigating the biological underpinnings of the relationship between prosody and reading. Motivated by this need, we present the Test of Prosody via Syllable Emphasis (&ldquo;TOPsy&rdquo;) and highlight its merits as a phenotyping tool to measure lexical stress sensitivity in as little as 10 min, in scalable internet-based cohorts. In this 28-item speech rhythm perception test [modeled after the stress identification test from Wade-Woolley (2016)], participants listen to multi-syllabic spoken words and are asked to identify lexical stress patterns. Psychometric analyses in a large internet-based sample shows excellent reliability, and predictive validity for self-reported difficulties with speech-language, reading, and musical beat synchronization. Further, items loaded onto two distinct factors corresponding to initially stressed vs. non-initially stressed words. These results are consistent with previous reports that speech rhythm perception abilities correlate with musical rhythm sensitivity and speech-language/reading skills, and are implicated in reading disorders (e.g., dyslexia). We conclude that TOPsy can serve as a useful tool for studying prosodic perception at large scales in a variety of different settings, and importantly can act as a validated brief phenotype for future investigations of the genetic architecture of prosodic perception, and its relationship to educational outcomes. &nbsp;</p

Approches comportementale et électrophysiologique du rôle de la prosodie dans la compréhension du langage

Le but de ce travail est de mieux comprendre le rôle de la prosodie dans la compréhension du langage parlé. Nous avons réalisé quatre expériences basées sur l'utilisation conjointe des méthodes issues de la psychologie expérimentale et des Potentiels Evoqués. La première étude avait pour but de tester la validité psychobiologique du focus prosodique, ainsi que l'influence du contexte pragmatique d'un discours sur le traitement des indices prosodiques. La deuxième étude était centrée sur les relations entre les traitements rythmique et sémantique. Enfin, le but des deux dernières études était de tester la spécificité linguistique du traitement de la hauteur tonale, en comparant langage et musique. Nous avons également examiné l'influence de l'expertise musicale en comparant les résultats obtenus chez des adultes musiciens et non-musiciens, et chez des enfants musiciens et non-musiciensAIX-MARSEILLE3-BU Sc.St Jérô (130552102) / SudocSudocFranceF

Musicians and the metric structure of words

*no abstrac

Musician Children Detect Pitch Violations in Both Music and Language Better than Nonmusician Children: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Approaches.

The idea that extensive musical training can influence processing in cognitive domains other than music has received considerable attention from the educational system and the media. Here we analyzed behavioral data and recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from 8-year-old children to test the hypothesis that musical training facilitates pitch processing not only in music but also in language. We used a parametric manipulation of pitch so that the final notes or words of musical phrases or sentences were congruous, weakly incongruous, or strongly incongruous. Musician children outperformed nonmusician children in the detection of the weak incongruity in both music and language. Moreover, the greatest differences in the ERPs of musician and nonmusician children were also found for the weak incongruity: whereas for musician children, early negative components developed in music and late positive components in language, no such components were found for nonmusician children. Finally, comparison of these results with previous ones from adults suggests that some aspects of pitch processing are in effect earlier in music than in language. Thus, the present results reveal positive transfer effects between cognitive domains and shed light on the time course and neural basis of the development of prosodic and melodic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience is the property of MIT Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)no abstrac

Context influences the processing of verb transitivity in French sentences: more evidence for semantic-syntax interactions

International audienceThe influence of semantic context on verb argument structure processing was investigated in two experiments using both ERP and behavioral measures. Participants were presented with sentences ending with syntactically and/or semantically congruous or incongruous noun phrases and they were asked to judge the overall acceptability of the sentences. Syntactically incongruous sentences contained an intransitive verb followed by a direct object (e.g., *L’ennemi a conspiré (INTR) un complot *‘The enemy conspired a scheme’). In the first experiment, strong semantic associations were present not only between the verb and the object (an internal object, as is a ‘scheme’ for the verb ‘conspire’), but also between the subject and the verb (e.g. the noun ‘enemy’ is a prototypical subject for ‘conspire’). In a second experiment we reduced the subject-verb semantic associations: the prototypical subject of the sentences was replaced by a semantically neutral proper name (e.g., Thomas), while keeping the same semantic associations between the verb and the object. In line with our hypothesis, results showed that the processing of syntactic incongruities was influenced by the degree of semantic congruency between the different sentence constituents (strong in Experiment 1 and weak in Experiment 2). Thus, the same syntactic incongruity was processed differently depending upon the semantic context of the sentence, thereby demonstrating the influence of semantic context on syntactic processing. We propose a linguistic account of the differential effects of verb transitivity as a function of the semantic context based upon Cognitive Construction Grammar and Frame Semantics

Relationship between phonology, prosody, & reading skills: A multifeature MMN experimental paradigm

Poster presented at the 23rd AMLaP Conference at Lancaster University, in Lancaster, England (September 2017