Besson et al. (1998) studied the relationship between song lyrics and tune processing
with the ERP technique to see whether the two kinds of processing were separated or
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integrated. They used 200 brief excerpts of best known French operatic songs and
manipulated the word at lyric-final position to be semantically anomalous, harmonic
anomalous (i.e. words sung out of key) or both. Hence, four experimental conditions were
constructed: semantically congruous and sung in key, semantically incongruous and sung in
key, semantically congruous and sung out of key and semantically incongruous and sung out
of key. They asked subjects, who were all musicians, to attend to the stimuli and to detect
semantic and harmonic incongruities. By recording subjects’ ERPs, they found a widespread
N400 effect elicited by semantic anomalies and a parietal distributed P300 effect by harmonic
anomalies. As for the condition with semantically incongruous and sung out of key, both
N400 and P300 were observed, though with smaller amplitude compared to the conditions
with either one type of anomaly. This finding indicated two significances. First, lyrics
processing would elicit N400 in the same manner as speech processing, suggesting that the
meaning of lyrics were not affected by the musical structures imposed on it. Second, with
different components elicited, lyrics and tunes processing were considered to be independent
of each other.
In an extended behavioral study, Bonnel et al. (2001) investigated the same issue but
with different methodology. Using the same corpus of French operatic song materials, they
designed two tasks, a single task and a dual task, which also involved four conditions: correct
version, semantic anomaly, tune anomaly and both types of anomalies. In the single task,
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subjects were divided into two groups and required to detect the anomaly in either language
or music condition. While in the dual task, all subjects needed to pay attention to both
language and music dimensions as to judge whether there is anomaly of each type. With this
methodology, the researchers could see how subjects’ attention was affected and distributed
in the single task and dual task. According to the results, lyrics and tunes were considered to
be processed independently since no deficit in subjects’ performance was observed in the dual
task. In other words, subjects were able to divide their attention to lyrics and tunes and to
perceive the two dimensions separately. Also, by recruiting singers, instrumentalists and
non-musicians as subjects and later comparing these groups’ performance, the musical
expertise was found independent of the authors’ findings. Thus, despite that ERPs were not
employed as measurement in this study, the behavioral results supported Besson et al’s (1998)
finding that showed the independence of lyrics processing.
Another study examining the processing of tunes and lyrics was carried out by Gordon
and her colleagues (Gordon et al., 2010). Taking a different position, they argued that sung
words (i.e. lyrics) were processed interactively with melodies in songs. Employing a
prime-target word pair paradigm, they designed four experimental conditions based on
same-different task with tri-syllable French words: same word-same melody, same
word-different melody, different word-same melody and different word-different melody.
Similarly, subjects, who were non-musicians, were instructed to decide whether the pairs of
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words or melodies were the same by performing either the linguistic or the musical task. As
expected, larger N400 was found when the prime and target words were different. To their
surprise, a similar N400 effect was also observed when melodies were different in
prime-target pair, which had similar onset latency but was smaller in amplitude compared to a
classical pattern of N400. In addition, the N400 found in the musical task was followed by a
late positivity. Topographically, the N400 effect was larger over centro-parietal sites in
linguistic task and larger over parietal sites in musical task, and it showed a slightly larger
right hemisphere predominance in both tasks. On interpreting the N400 effect found in the
musical task, Gordon et al. (2010) attributed it to the automatic processing of sung word
meaning regardless of the direction of attention. With the elicitation of N400 effect in musical
task, it was thus asserted that there was an interaction between lyrics and melody processing.
This finding, though in contrast to previous studies (Besson et al., 1998; Bonnel et al., 2001),
still could be taken as one more piece of evidence supporting the similarity in the processing
of spoken language and lyrics.
To briefly sum up, all the three studies illustrated above discussed the issue of lyrics
processing. Even though they reached different conclusions in terms of the relationship
between lyrics processing and tune processing, their results all suggested that lyrics were
processed as speech that would elicit N400 when semantic anomaly or semantic
unexpectancy appeared. However, the paradigms used in these studies might be a
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confounding factor in addressing lyrics processing because they all directed subjects’
attention to one specific task (e.g. linguistic or musical task), which might have had subjects
intentionally attend to the semantic meaning of lyrics when performing the task. Therefore,
the observed semantic processing of lyrics might be task-specific, and whether people
semantically process lyrics in regular song perception is still unknown. What’s more, the
manner of lyrics stimuli presentation in the studies is to have the songs sung a cappella (i.e.
without musical instruments accompanied). Though the way of presentation enables listeners
to recognize that the auditory stimuli are songs, it is not as “authentic” as how people
generally perceive lyrics when listening to songs.
Regarding the two possible confounding factors (i.e. paradigm and stimulus presentation)
in these studies on lyrics processing, the current study therefore carried out a different
experimental design by employing a semantic priming paradigm and presenting lyrics
naturally as excerpts of songs, as will be discussed in Chapter 3.