其他摘要 | Long-term nonverbal musical training experience has been demonstrated totransfer its beneficial effect to the domain of speech processing, which is suggested tobe associated with the improved acoustic processing or the improved high-levelcognitive functions in musicians (relative to non-musicians). Although accumulatedlines of evidence have been provided on how music expertise promotes phonologicalprocessing, still little is known about the potential influence of musical expertise onhigher-level semantic processing. In the current research, we examined whethermusical expertise could enhance the mechanism of lexical semantic predicitiveprocessing during online speech comprehension, and how this enhancement effect (ifexsits) is related to the “acoustic processing improving mechanism” and the“cognitive processing improving mechanism”. The current study defined twoprocessing stages of lexical semantic prediction, that is, the process of forming lexicalprediction prior to the target nouns (at the pre-noun critical verbs), and the process ofintegrating the new bottom-up predicted target nouns with the preceding context afterits actual occurance (at the critical nouns). EEG technique was adopted to examine thebrain activities associated with lexical semantic prediction while musicians andnon-musicians were comprehending high/low predictable sentences.
Study I was conducted in the quiet situations. Experiment 1 examined whethermusical expertise enhances lexical semantic prediction in the quiet listening condition;and meanwhile, in order to investigate the potential role of bottom-up acousticprocessing in the transfer effect of musical expertise on lexical semantic prediction,Experiment 1 also adopted a rhythm-priming paradigm (congruent/incongruent). Theresults showed that, at the critical verbs preceding the critical nouns, only musiciansshowed robust brain activities associated with the easiness of anticipating theupcoming nouns, while non-musicians showed brain activities associated with theeasiness of integrating the verbs themselves; this enhancement effect of lexical semantic prediction in musicians was stronger in the incongruent rhythm-primingcondition. These findings suggested that musical expertise improves lexical semanticpredictive processing in the quiet speech comprehension situation; this beneficialeffect is probably not the merely by-product of the promoted bottom-up acousticprocessing in musicians, but is more likely to be related to their strengthenedtop-down cognitive processing improving mechanism. Experiment 2 further examinedwhehther musical expertise promotes semantic processing system itself in thesituation of reading comprehension through the “generally promoted cognitiveprocessing improving mechanism”. The results showed that, as compared tonon-musicians, musicians demonstrated more delayed ERP effects related to lexicalanticipation of the target nouns, as well as more delayed and weaker facilitation effectof prior lexical prediction onto the integrative process of the target nouns. Thesefindings thus probably indicated a null effect of musical expertise on semanticprocessing itself in lexical semantic predictive processing in reading comprehensiondue to the generally promoted high-level cognitive processing improving mechanism.
Study 2 was conducted in the noisy situations. Experiment 3 examined whethermusical expertise improves lexical semantic prediction in the noisy listening conditionin the same pool of participants (musicians and non-musicians) of Experiment 2. Theresults showed that, at the critical verbs, both musicians and non-musicians showedactivities associated with anticipating the forthcoming critical nouns with comparableonset latency, whereas such noun-anticipation effect was stronger in musicians (ascompared to non-musicians); at the critical nouns, the facilitation effect of lexicalprediction on noun integration occurred earlier and exhibited stronger effect size inmusicians relative to non-musicians. These findings suggested that, musical expertisemight specifically promote the processes of lexical semantic prediction in speechcomprehension (instead of reading comprehension); in the noisy listening condition,musical expertise improves the strength of lexical prediction as well as the integrationof new bottom-up input of the predicted nouns. Experiment 4 aimed at furtherexploring the reasons underlying the facilitation effect of musical expertise on lexicalsemantic prediction in noisy speech comprehension situation, thus replicatingexperiment 3 with an additive manipulation of the acoustic cues of low-frequencyrhythm of the target speech signals (i.e. with or without low-frequency envelopeexpansion). The results of EEG Experiment showed that, at the critical verbs,musicians exhibited earlier and stronger activities associated with lexical anticipationof the target nouns; at the critical nouns, musicians also demonstrated ealier andstronger facilitation effect of noun integration due to lexical prediction. Though boththe beharviral results of the pretest and the results of the EEG experiment showed that,musicians were more proficient in the processing of low-frequency rhythm expansioncues of the target speech signals (as compared to non-musicians), we did not find amediating effect of these low-frequency rhythm expansion cues on the online ERPeffects associated with lexical anticipation or its influence on noun integration amongthe two groups. The following bahaviroal experiment failed to show that musicalexpertise improves working memory updating speed as well as on non-verbal generalpredictions of visual sequences and auditory sequences.
In summary, this dissertation suggested that, musical expertise promotes theprocesses of conducting lexical semantic prediction in speech comprehension; andmoreover, these enhancement effects of musical expertise on the processes of lexicalsemantic prediction were found to not purely result from musicinas’ potentialadvantage on bottom-up acoustic processing or general top-down cognitiveprocessing, instead, this transfer effect might be associated with the interactiveinfluence of these two mechanisms onto enhancing the efficiency of informationtransimission across the semantic-phonological-acoustic hierarchies during onlinelexical semantic prediction in the situations of speech comprehension. |
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