Musical experience has been found to aid speech perception. This electroencephalography study further examined whether and how musical expertise affects high-level predictive semantic processing in speech comprehension. Musicians and non-musicians listened to semantically strongly/weakly constraining sentences, with each sentence being primed by a congruent/incongruent sentence-prosody. At the target nouns, a N400 reduction effect (strongly vs. weakly constraining) was observed in both groups, with the onset-latency of this effect being delayed for incongruent (vs. congruent) priming. At the transitive verbs preceding these target nouns, musicians’ event-related-potential amplitude (in incongruent-priming) and beta-band oscillatory power (in congruent- and incongruent-priming) showed a semantic-constraint effect, and were correlated with the predictability of incoming nouns; non-musicians only demonstrated an event-related-potential semantic-constraint effect, which was correlated with the predictability of current verbs. These results indicate musical expertise enhances semantic prediction tendency in speech comprehension, and this effect might be not just an aftereffect of facilitated acoustic/phonological processing.

已经发现音乐体验有助于语音感知。这项脑电图研究进一步检验了音乐专业知识是否以及如何影响语音理解中的高级预测语义处理。音乐家和非音乐家听语义强/弱约束的句子，每个句子都由一致/不一致的句子韵律引导。在目标名词上，在两组中都观察到了 N400 减少效应（强约束与弱约束），这种效应的起始延迟因不一致（与一致）启动而延迟。在这些目标名词之前的及物动词上，音乐家的事件相关电位振幅（incongruent-priming）和 beta 波段振荡功率（in congruent- and incongruent-priming ) 表现出语义约束效应，并与传入名词的可预测性相关；非音乐家仅表现出与事件相关的潜在语义约束效应，这与当前动词的可预测性相关。这些结果表明音乐专业知识增强了语音理解中的语义预测倾向，这种效果可能不仅仅是促进声学/语音处理的后遗症。