Hierarchical organization of melodic sequences is encoded by cortical entrainment.

ABSTRACT: Natural speech is organized according to a hierarchical structure, with individual speech sounds combining to form abstract linguistic units, and abstract linguistic units combining to form higher-order linguistic units. Since the boundaries between these units are not always indicated by acoustic cues, they must often be computed internally. Signatures of this internal computation were reported by Ding et al. (2016), who presented isochronous sequences of mono-syllabic words that combined to form phrases that combined to form sentences, and showed that cortical responses simultaneously encode boundaries at multiple levels of the linguistic hierarchy. In the present study, we designed melodic sequences that were hierarchically organized according to Western music conventions. Specifically,

SUBMITTER: Baltzell LS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6703931 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature