Deceptive Cadences: Investigation of the P600 in sentences and musical phrases within musicians and non-musicians

Poster Session E - Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:30 – 4:30 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Hannah Reinicke¹, Grit Herzmann¹; ¹The College of Wooster

Music and language engage similar cognitive processes within the brain, and both are rule-governed, hierarchical structures. Musical expertise improves auditory and motor regions of the brain, but language capacity is not modulated by musical expertise. In event-related potential (ERP) studies, the P600 ERP component is considered an indicator for the processing of syntactic incongruities in sentences. The P600 has also been found during the processing of chord progressions in musicians. The current study investigated the extent that the P600 from musicians and non-musicians can be compared during musical and syntactic processing. Participants were grouped using the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Test (Gold-MSI) which subjectively measured participants’ relationship with music, and the Musical Ear Test (MET), an objective, perceptual measure of musicianship using melodic and rhythmic phrases. Musicians, as classified based on their scores on the Gold-MSI, performed significantly better on the MET than non-musicians. Participants listened to sentences that were either grammatically correct or incorrect, as well as consonant or dissonant musical phrases. The P600 for language stimuli replicated previous findings of more positive P600 amplitudes for syntactically incorrect sentences as compared to syntactically correct sentences in both groups. The P600 for musical stimuli was more positive in the musician group when listening to dissonant phrases compared to consonant phrases, while non-musicians demonstrated smaller P600 responses to dissonant musical stimuli compared to musicians. These results may contribute to an argument that music processing is innate within all humans, given that music follows similar rule-governing patterns to language once expertise is equated.

Topic Area: LANGUAGE: Syntax