Rhythmic (hierarchical) versus serial structure in speech and other behavior.

An acoustically invariant one-word segment occurred in two versions of one syntactic context. In one version, the preceding intonation contour indicated that a stress would fall at the point where this word occurred. In the other version. the preceding contour predicted reduced stress at that point. Reaction time to the initial phoneme of the word was faster in the former case, despite the fact that no acoustic correlates of stress were present. It is concluded that a part of the sentence comprehension process is the prediction of upcoming sentence accents.The greater the degree of stress assigned to a word in a sentence, the longer its vowel (or the vowel of its stressed syllable) will be, the higher the relative pitch of the word will be, and, in general, the greater the peak amplitude of its stressed syllable will be (Lehiste, 1970). Words assigned little relative stress in a sentence, on the other hand, tend to have shorter duration, lower relative pitch, and less relative amplitude; further, the vowels in unstressed words often reduce to lal. It is reasonable to expect that words that are longer, louder, and higher pitched should be somewhat easier to comprehend than words that are shorter, softer, and lower pitched and contain reduced vowels; indeed, Lieberman (1963) has shown that this is true of isolated words which are excised from a sentence context. Such differences in ease of comprehension, or intelligibility, should be of importance in the course of sentence processing. The more easily an acoustic representation can be decoded, the more quickly its meaning can be retrieved from the mental lexicon to contribute to the semantic representation being constructed of the sentence.That assigning stress to an item in a sentence will affect the role that item takes in the comprehension process has, in fact, been demonstrated by several recent investigations using the phoneme monitoring technique. In a phoneme monitoring experiment, subjects are asked to comprehend sentences and at the same time to listen within them for the occurrence of a specified word-initial phoneme. Reaction time to the target phoneme in this task has been assumed to be sensitive to momentary processing difficulty during sentence comprehension; it is raised, for instance, by the occurrence immediately prior to the target-bearing word of a low-frequency word (Foss, 1969) or of an ambiguous item (Foss, 1970). Cutler and Foss (in press), investigating the source of faster reaction times to

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“…Thus, they claimed that their result provided support for the theory proposed by Martin (1972), according to which the elements of a speech…”

supporting

confidence: 58%

Phoneme-monitoring reaction time as a function of preceding intonation contour

Cutler

1976

Perception & Psychophysics

206

163

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“…Collard & Povel, 1982;Jones, 1976;Martin, 1972;Rosenbaum, Kenny, & Derr, 1983). Thus, the shared representation can be considered a two-tiered framework comprising both individual events and their organization.…”

Section: Auditory Feedback and Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory Feedback in Music Performance: The Role of Melodic Structure and Musical Skill.

Pfordresher¹

2005

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

116

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Five experiments explored whether fluency in musical sequence production relies on matches between the contents of auditory feedback and the planned outcomes of actions. Participants performed short melodies from memory on a keyboard while musical pitches that sounded in synchrony with each keypress (feedback contents) were altered. Results indicated that altering pitch contents can disrupt production, but only when altered pitches form a sequence that is structurally similar to the planned sequence. These experiments also addressed the role of musical skill: Experiments 1 and 3 included trained pianists; other experiments included participants with little or no musical training. Results were similar across both groups with respect to the disruptive effects of auditory feedback manipulations. These results support the idea that a common hierarchical representation guides sequences of actions and the perception of event sequences and that this coordination is not acquired from learned associations formed by musical skill acquisition.

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“…An early paper concerned with rhythm processing is one by Martin (1972). In this paper, Martin proposes a distinction between sequential versus hierarchical coding of temporal sequences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%