title: Ways of making-sense: Local gamma synchronization reveals differences between semantic processing induced by music and language.
abstract: Similar to linguistic stimuli, music can also prime the meaning of a subsequent word. However, it is so far unknown what is the brain dynamics underlying the semantic priming effect induced by music, and its relation to language. To elucidate these issues, we compare the brain oscillatory response to visual words that have been semantically primed either by a musical excerpt or by an auditory sentence. We found that semantic violation between music-word pairs triggers a classical ERP N400, and induces a sustained increase of long-distance theta phase synchrony, along with a transient increase of local gamma activity. Similar results were observed after linguistic semantic violation except for gamma activity, which increased after semantic congruence between sentence-word pairs. Our findings indicate that local gamma activity is a neural marker that signals different ways of semantic processing between music and language, revealing the dynamic and self-organized nature of the semantic processing.
authors.affiliation: Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Educación, CIAE, Universidad de Chile, 8330014 Santiago, Chile. Electronic address: paulo.barraza@ciae.uchile.cl.
authors.forename: Paulo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Barraza
authors.affiliation: CNRS-UMR-7225, Hôpital Pitié Salpêtrière, 75013 Paris, France. Electronic address: mario.chavez@upmc.fr.
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chavez
authors.affiliation: Laboratorio de Neurociencias, Escuela de Psicología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 8940000 Santiago, Chile. Electronic address: erodrigb@uc.cl.
authors.forename: Eugenio
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Rodríguez
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D005071:Evoked Potentials; D005260:Female; D065818:Gamma Rhythm / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D009146:Music; D012660:Semantics; D013826:Theta Rhythm; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: EEG; ERP N400; Gamma band; Language; Music; Neural synchrony; Semantic processing