Associations between home literacy environment and children's reading ability are often assumed to reflect a direct influence. However, heritability could account for the association between parent and child literacy‐related measures. We used data from 101 mother/father/child triads to consider the extent to which associations between home literacy and children's reading fluency could be accounted for by parental reading fluency. Although home literacy correlated significantly with children's reading, no variable predicted significant variance after allowing for parental reading, except the number of books in the home. By incorporating measures of heritable parental traits into studies investigating home environment effects, we can start to identify which variables are correlates of parental traits and which might play a causal role in fostering children's development.

The perception of a regular beat is fundamental to music processing. Here we examine whether the detection of a regular beat is pre-attentive for metrically simple, acoustically varying stimuli using the mismatch negativity (MMN), an ERP response elicited by violations of acoustic regularity irrespective of whether subjects are attending to the stimuli. Both musicians and non-musicians were presented with a varying rhythm with a clear accent structure in which occasionally a sound was omitted. We compared the MMN response to the omission of identical sounds in different metrical positions. Most importantly, we found that omissions in strong metrical positions, on the beat, elicited higher amplitude MMN responses than omissions in weak metrical positions, not on the beat. This suggests that the detection of a beat is pre-attentive when highly beat inducing stimuli are used. No effects of musical expertise were found. Our results suggest that for metrically simple rhythms with clear accents beat processing does not require attention or musical expertise. In addition, we discuss how the use of acoustically varying stimuli may influence ERP results when studying beat processing.

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It is believed that auditory processes governing grouping and segmentation of sounds are automatic and represent universal aspects of music perception (e.g., they are independent of the listener's musical skill). The present study challenges this view by showing that musicians and nonmusicians differ in their ability to preattentively group consecutive sounds. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) from professional musicians and nonmusicians who were presented with isochronous tone sequences that they ignored. Four consecutive tones in a sequence could be grouped according to either pitch similarity or good continuation of pitch. Occasionally, the tone-group length was violated by a deviant tone. The mismatch negativity (MMN) was elicited to the deviants in both subject groups when the sounds could be grouped based on pitch similarity. In contrast, MMN was only elicited in musicians when the sounds could be grouped according to good continuation of pitch. These results suggest that some forms of auditory grouping depend on musical skill and that not all aspects of auditory grouping are universal.

Implicit knowledge has been proposed to be the substrate of intuition because intuitive judgments resemble implicit processes. We investigated whether the automatically elicited mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) can reflect implicit knowledge and whether this knowledge can be utilized for intuitive sound discrimination. We also determined the sensitivity of the attention-and task-dependent P3 component to intuitive versus explicit knowledge. We recorded the ERPs elicited in an "abstract" oddball paradigm. Tone pairs roving over different frequencies but with a constant ascending inter-pair interval, were presented as frequent standard events. The standards were occasionally replaced by deviating, descending tone pairs. The ERPs were recorded under both ignore and attend conditions. Subjects were interviewed and classified on the basis of whether or not they could datect the deviants. The deviants elicited an MMN even in subjects who subsequent to the MMN recording did not express awareness of the deviants. This suggests that these subjects possessed implicit knowledge of the sound-sequence structure. Some of these subjects learned, in an associative training session, to detect the deviants intuitively, that is, they could detect the deviants but did not give a correct description of how the deviants differed from the standards. Intuitive deviant detection was not accompanied by P3 elicitation whereas subjects who developed explicit knowledge of the sound sequence during the training did show a P3 to the detected deviants.