Abstract To investigate potentially shared syntactic mechanisms between language and music, we conducted a novel adaptation of the dual task paradigm without syntactic violations to assess the degree of bidirectional interaction between the two domains. Participants listened to music progressions while reading natural language sentences, and were then asked to provide, in randomized order, music closure judgments and language comprehension answers. We manipulated both language and music stimuli in terms of their syntactic structural complexity and syntactic working memory demands based on nonlocal dependencies between words or chords. We discovered a bidirectional yet unbalanced pattern of cross‐domain interaction whereby language exerted relatively more influences over music than vice versa, apparently resulting mostly from syntactic structural complexity instead of syntactic working memory demands, although we discuss the possibility that alternative heuristic strategies may have been employed during concurrent, resource‐demanding processes. We also found that cross‐domain interactions were often most prominent when syntactically critical words and keys temporally coincided across sequences. These results provide new evidence in support of theoretical models of shared resources between language and music.
The ability to detect statistical regularities in the input is widely assumed to support language acquisition, but its unique contribution to individual differences in language outcomes remains uncertain, especially in neurodevelopmental conditions. This study tested whether statistical learning predicts expressive vocabulary and grammatical skills in children with typical development and in groups with developmental language disorder, autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. A total of 102 Hungarian-speaking children aged 8 to 15 years completed tasks assessing statistical learning, auditory and visual perceptual speed, short-term and working memory, sentence repetition, and expressive vocabulary. Statistical learning showed modest associations with language measures, but the effects of perceptual speed and working memory were stronger. Verbal working memory consistently emerged as the strongest predictor of vocabulary and sentence repetition across all groups. At the same time, the relatively low reliability of the statistical learning measures may have attenuated the observed associations, potentially leading to an underestimation of the strength of their relationship with language. The pattern of associations did not differ systematically between diagnostic groups, consistent with the idea that variation in language outcomes reflects general cognitive differences that cut across traditional diagnostic categories. This finding is consistent with dimensional accounts of neurodevelopment, which propose that differences between conditions arise through quantitative rather than qualitative variation in core cognitive processes. However, the various dimensions were hard to disentangle at this sample size. By demonstrating this pattern for language abilities, the present study extends the dimensional perspective to the domain of language development and highlights the importance of accounting for shared cognitive mechanisms when studying typical and atypical language variation.
While a growing body of research has identified the crossmodal correspondences between nonlinguistic pitch and vertical space, little is known about the non-arbitrariness of linguistic tones within the language domain. This study investigates the vertical mappings of Cantonese lexical tones (high rising vs. low falling) in two crossmodal domains: (1) spatial motions (upward vs. downward) and (2) emotional valence (positive vs. negative). Results showed that Cantonese speakers could reliably map tones based on pitch and motion trajectories (i.e., rising contour is upward, and falling contour is downward), but the vertical mapping between tones and valence (i.e., rising contour is positive, and falling contour is negative) was much weaker and modulated by vowels. In general, these findings suggest that lexical tones can be conceptualized and understood in the vertical dimension, even in the language where speakers do not talk about tones using spatially relevant terms. In addition, tonal iconicity, and sound symbolism in general, is differentiated according to the mechanisms in which they are grounded. Specifically, sound symbolism that relies on a direct structural parallel produces a more consistent mapping, whereas correspondence grounded in metaphorical mediation is more easily influenced by other linguistic factors. Thus, this research provides evidence for the sound symbolic nature of lexical tones, suggesting their conceptual mapping in tonal languages.
It is natural to express some beliefs in binary terms (P is either believed or not, e.g., "bribery is immoral"), and others in terms of a subjective probability (P has some probability of being true, e.g., "there's an 80% chance a Democrat will win the next election"). Construing a belief in probabilistic terms (other than 0% or 100%) implicitly conveys a recognition of uncertainty (one's ignorance) and the possibility of being wrong (one's fallibility), which are key characteristics of intellectual humility (IH). Across two studies, we explore the hypothesis that probabilistic belief is associated with greater IH. Although we fail to find this association across participants, comparing their trait-level IH, in either a student sample (Study 1, N = 279) or two nationally representative samples (Study 2a, N = 269; Study 2b, N = 270), we do find the predicted association within participants, analyzing belief-specific IH (Studies 2a and 2b): political and moral beliefs that are classified as probabilistic rather than binary are associated with a more intellectually humble attitude toward those beliefs, even controlling for the extremity of belief. These findings support the psychological reality of a distinction between binary and probabilistic belief, and further raise the possibility that promoting probabilistic belief could foster greater IH, including in consequential domains such as politics and morality.
Low-level occipital regions, including the primary visual cortex (V1), are known to play a pivotal role in generating the Ebbinghaus size illusion, in which a circle surrounded by small inducers looks larger than an identical circle surrounded by large inducers. However, a definitive answer is still lacking as to whether the low-level visual cortex plays its role at the feedforward stage of processing. To resolve this issue, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by two equal-size circles flashed on the left and right sides of human participants, with one side constantly displaying large surrounding inducers and the other side small inducers. Experiment 1 unveiled a significant lateralization in the evoked C1 component, a well-established ERP index of afferent V1 activity, only when the circle within small inducers was perceived as larger but not when the circle within large inducers was perceived as larger. This illusion-specific C1 lateralization, which closely resembled the C1 modulation evoked by physical differences in size, was further replicated in Experiment 2 even when the attentional bias toward small inducers was invalidated as an alternative account. Furthermore, Granger causality analysis revealed a one-way transfer of information from V1-representative electrodes to extrastriate-representative electrodes during the C1 lateralization. Together, these findings offer the strongest evidence to date that the Ebbinghaus illusion begins at the feedforward stage of cortical visual processing, consistent with the prediction of the contour interaction theory.
