Electrophysiological evidence for a specific neural correlate of musical violation expectation in primary-school children.

The majority of studies on music processing in children used simple musical stimuli. Here, primary schoolchildren judged the appropriateness of musical closure in expressive polyphone music, while high-density electroencephalography was recorded. Stimuli ended either regularly or contained refined in-key harmonic transgressions at closure. The children discriminated the transgressions well above chance. Regular and transgressed endings evoked opposite scalp voltage configurations peaking around 400ms after stimulus onset with bilateral frontal negativity for regular and centro-posterior negativity (CPN) for transgressed endings. A positive correlation could be established between strength of the CPN response and rater sensitivity (d-prime). We also investigated whether the capacity to discriminate the transgressions was supported by auditory domain specific or general cognitive mechanisms, and found that working memory capacity predicted transgression discrimination. Latency and distribution of the CPN are reminiscent of the N400, typically observed in response to semantic incongruities in language. Therefore our observation is intriguing, as the CPN occurred here within an intra-musical context, without any symbols referring to the external world. Moreover, the harmonic in-key transgressions that we implemented may be considered syntactical as they transgress structural rules. Such structural incongruities in music are typically followed by an early right anterior negativity (ERAN) and an N5, but not so here. Putative contributive sources of the CPN were localized in left pre-motor, mid-posterior cingulate and superior parietal regions of the brain that can be linked to integration processing. These results suggest that, at least in children, processing of syntax and meaning may coincide in complex intra-musical contexts.