Journal of cognitive neuroscience
-
A neural correlate for phrase boundary perception in music has recently been identified in musicians. It is called music closure positive shift ("music CPS") and has an equivalent in the perception of speech ("language CPS"). The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of musical expertise and different phrase boundary markers on the music CPS, using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and event-related magnetic fields (ERFs). ⋯ This is taken as evidence that the CPS mainly reflects higher cognitive processing of phrasing, rather than mere perception of pauses. Furthermore, results suggest that the ERP and MEG methods are sensitive to different aspects within phrase perception. For both subject groups, qualitatively different ERP components (CPS and early negativity) seem to reflect a top-down activation of general but different phrasing schemata, whereas quantitatively differing MEG signals appear to reflect gradual differences in the bottom-up processing of acoustic boundary markers.