ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology of Language
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1512267
Not primed to agree? Short or no effect of rhythmic priming on typical adults processing number agreement
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
- 2University of Reading, Reading, England, United Kingdom
- 3Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands
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Accumulating evidence shows improved syntactic processing after exposure to a rhythmically regular compared to an irregular musical prime, environmental noise, or silence. One potentially shared system between musical rhythm and language processing may be responsible for the construction of hierarchical sequences. Following findings of a shorter-lived rhythmic priming effect in Jabberwocky and more precise neural tracking of linguistic constituents in natural language than in Jabberwocky, the present study hypothesised that a) hierarchical structure building constitutes a key shared mechanism between rhythm and language processing and b) semantic information may also play a role in structure building. The present study was built as a minimal pair comparison of György et al. ( 2024)'s Experiment 2. In three experiments, French-speaking typical adults listened to 32-second rhythmic primes before completing six-sentence blocks of grammaticality judgement on natural language and jabberwocky materials in lab and online due to the sanitary situation. Results showed a heavily reduced priming effect present only in the first sentence after a prime in Experiment 1 (natural language, online) and no priming in effects in Experiments 2 (jabberwocky, online) and 3 (natural language, in lab). Replicating previous results, overall grammaticality judgement d' correlated with performance in a rhythm discrimination task. In two out of three experiments, grammaticality judgement performance correlated with rhythm discrimination. These correlationsThe effects found in the present study support the hypothesis of a domain-general cognitive network responsible for hierarchical structure building in rhythm and language processing, but do not rule out alternative accounts. However, these the priming data showcase that the rhythmic priming effect is reduced when typical speakers process sentences containing linguistic information available at all levels compared to atypical populations processing natural language or typical adults processing syntactic structures in the absence of lexical semantics, and do not suggest a key role of lexico-semantic information in rhythmic priming. Furthermore, relationships between the rhythmic priming effect, rhythm discrimination, and spontaneous speech synchronisation suggest that sensitivity to rhythmic priming may be influenced by 41 several factors in typical speakers. 42
Keywords: rhythmic priming, entrainment, hierarchical structure building, Music, syntactic processing
Received: 16 Oct 2024; Accepted: 22 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 György, Saddy, Kotz and Franck. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Dávid György, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland
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