The music of language: an ERP investigation of the effects of musical training on emotional prosody processing

Ana P Pinheiro; Margarida Vasconcelos; Marcelo Dias; Nuno Arrais; Óscar F Gonçalves

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2014.10.009

The music of language: an ERP investigation of the effects of musical training on emotional prosody processing

Brain Lang. 2015 Jan:140:24-34. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2014.10.009. Epub 2014 Nov 21.

Authors

Ana P Pinheiro¹, Margarida Vasconcelos², Marcelo Dias², Nuno Arrais³, Óscar F Gonçalves⁴

Affiliations

¹ Neuropsychophysiology Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal; Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. Electronic address: ana.pinheiro@psi.uminho.pt.
² Neuropsychophysiology Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.
³ Music Department, Institute of Arts and Human Sciences, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.
⁴ Neuropsychophysiology Lab, CIPsi, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal; Spaulding Center of Neuromodulation, Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.

PMID: 25461917
DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2014.10.009

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated the positive effects of musical training on the perception of vocally expressed emotion. This study investigated the effects of musical training on event-related potential (ERP) correlates of emotional prosody processing. Fourteen musicians and fourteen control subjects listened to 228 sentences with neutral semantic content, differing in prosody (one third with neutral, one third with happy and one third with angry intonation), with intelligible semantic content (semantic content condition--SCC) and unintelligible semantic content (pure prosody condition--PPC). Reduced P50 amplitude was found in musicians. A difference between SCC and PPC conditions was found in P50 and N100 amplitude in non-musicians only, and in P200 amplitude in musicians only. Furthermore, musicians were more accurate in recognizing angry prosody in PPC sentences. These findings suggest that auditory expertise characterizing extensive musical training may impact different stages of vocal emotional processing.

Keywords: Emotional prosody; Event-related potentials; Language; Musical training.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Acoustic Stimulation
Adolescent
Adult
Anger
Auditory Perception / physiology
Electroencephalography
Emotions / physiology*
Evoked Potentials / physiology*
Evoked Potentials, Auditory / physiology*
Female
Happiness
Humans
Language*
Male
Music / psychology*
Semantics
Speech
Young Adult