Exploring music-syntactic processing and language-syntactic processing in congenital amusia using MEG and EEG

The current study is investigating music-syntactic processing and language-syntactic processing in congenital amusia using electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). For the music experiment, 80 western five-note-melodies were created with a piano timbre. They were randomly mixed with the same 80 melodies ending with an out-of-key note. Another 40 melodies were included that contain one note with a deviant instrument (i.e. guitar). Participants were asked to detect these timbre-deviants. For the language experiment, five word English sentences were presented orally. The final word was either syntactically incorrect, semantically incongruent, or syntactically / semantically ‘correct’. To ensure they attended to the stimuli, participants were occasionally required to answer questions on randomly selected trials related to the sentence they just heard. Brain activity was recorded using concurrent 160-channel MEG and 64-channel EEG. Preliminary EEG results showed that syntactic violations in both music and language elicited similar brain responses in normal controls (ERAN and N5 for the music task and ELAN and N400 for the language task); Amusics showed deficits to some extent in these event-related brain responses in both music and language tasks.