Neural integration of musical and lyrical emotion: semantic–acoustic congruence in song processing

Songs convey emotion through the joint contribution of musical-acoustic structure, lyrical semantics, and vocal-prosodic expression, yet these information sources have often been examined separately in affective neuroscience. This Mini Review synthesizes behavioral, electroencephalographic/event-related potential (EEG/ERP), magnetoencephalographic (MEG), and functional neuroimaging evidence relevant to semantic–acoustic emotional congruence during song processing. Available findings suggest that lyrics and melodies engage partially dissociable but interacting processes during song perception. Early MEG responses around 130–140 ms differentiate lyric and melodic expectancy violations in memorized songs, while N400 modulations provide evidence of context-sensitive meaning-related processing across musical and verbal materials. Later positive components may reflect additional attentional allocation and evaluative processing under conflicting or ambiguous conditions, although their functional interpretations remain task-dependent. Functional neuroimaging studies have implicated superior temporal, middle temporal, and inferior frontal regions in lyric–melody processing, whereas studies of music-evoked emotion more broadly have reported activity in the amygdala, insula, cingulate cortex, hippocampus, and striatal regions. The specific contributions of these regions to music–lyric emotional congruence, however, remain uncertain. Behavioral evidence further suggests that congruence does not uniformly facilitate emotional processing and that incongruence may sometimes increase arousal or alter the relative weighting of musical and lyrical cues. On this basis, the review proposes a provisional dynamic weighted-integration account in which musical-acoustic affect, lyrical meaning, and vocal prosody interact across temporally overlapping processing stages, with their relative contributions varying according to expectations, attention, expertise, and language accessibility. Direct neural evidence specifically manipulating music–lyric emotional congruence remains limited, identifying an important direction for future naturalistic and multimodal research.