Music speaks louder than lyrics: a conceptual priming experiment

The results showed significantly faster responses to target words associated with the music than to those associated with the lyrics of the prime. This effect remained significant even after controlling for various properties of the primes and targets, which had been assessed by an additional 234 participants in complementary studies prior to the priming experiment. We also found a significant interaction between target type (music- vs. lyrics-related) and the Euclidean distance of valence and arousal between the prime and target: affective distance predicted reaction times only for music-derived targets. Ratings from the complementary studies indicated that music evoked more positive and arousing responses than lyrics, while lyrics appeared to dampen the affective intensity of musical excerpts. Our findings challenge the assumption of tight integration between melody and lyrics in song processing. They suggest that music and language contribute unequally to conceptual interpretation in song, with music playing a more dominant role. These results offer new insights into the construction of multi-modal meanings and the cognitive mechanisms underlying song comprehension.