Debriefing form

Thank you for completing this experiment, we truly appreciate your effort. We sought to understand the relationship between music and language; specifically, we examined if processing musical syntax and processing structural sentence relationships in language (i.e., linguistic syntax) shared mental processing. In this experiment, you read sentences in short segments while listening to chords. We manipulated these chords such that some were expected (i.e., in-key) and some chords were unexpected (i.e., out-of-key); this is our measure of musical syntax.

Consider the following sentence:

(1) "The scientist confirmed the hypothesis was being studied in his lab"

This sentence is syntactically unexpected because your initial thought that "the hypothesis" was the direct object of "confirmed"; however, "the hypothesis" is the subject of an embedded sentence ("the hypothesis was being studied…"). Therefore, when you read the word "was", you probably read it relatively slowly because you had to reinterpret the sentence's syntactic structure. This was our measure of linguistic syntax. Additionally, we manipulated musical syntax at the word "was" to either be an in-key chord or an out-of-key chord. We expected that your reading time would be especially slow during this segment due to the combination of the linguistic and musical unexpectancy.

Additionally, we sought to examine if syntactic processing only relates to musical key structure, or if changing other types of interpretations would show similar effects. To do this, we manipulated sentences meaning to be expected or unexpected.

Consider the following sentence:

(2) When the woman found the bug, she quickly unplugged the spy equipment from the wall.

This sentence is semantically unexpected because your initial thought that "the bug" would refer to an insect; however, we were referring to spyware. Unlike sentence 1, hearing an unexpected chord should not result in especially slower reading times because there is no unexpected syntax.

In summary, if key relationships in music are processed like syntactic relationships in language, you should be especially slower to read "was" in sentence 1 when that word was paired with an out of key chord. However, you should not be especially slowed by an out of key chord on sentence 2 because it involves an unexpected meaning.

This concludes our study. We are grateful for your time and participation in our experiment. If you have any questions, concerns, or want to know how the experiment concluded in the future, please contact the experimenter Rachel Thompson (rthomp19@umd.edu) or Dr. Robert Slevc (slevc@umd.edu). We'd love to answer your questions as you have them.