The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music

The processing of a target chord depends on the previous musical context in which it has appeared. This harmonic priming effect occurs for fine syntactic-like changes in context and is observed irrespective of the extent of participants' musical expertise (Bigand & Pineau, Perception and Psychophysics, 59 (1997) 1098). The present study investigates how the harmonic context influences the processing of phonemes in vocal music. Eight-chord sequences were presented to participants. The four notes of each chord were played with synthetic phonemes and participants were required to quickly decide whether the last chord (the target) was sung on a syllable containing the phoneme /i/ or /u/. The musical relationship of the target chord to the previous context was manipulated so that the target chord acted as a referential tonic chord or as a congruent but less structurally important subdominant chord. Phoneme monitoring was faster for the tonic chord than for the subdominant chord. This finding has several implications for music cognition and speech perception. It also suggests that musical and phonemic processing interact at some stage of processing.

[1]  M. R. Jones,et al.  Dynamic attending and responses to time. , 1989, Psychological review.

[2]  D. J. Foss,et al.  On the Role of Sentence Stress in Sentence Processing , 1977, Language and speech.

[3]  I. Peretz,et al.  Singing in the Brain: Independence of Lyrics and Tunes , 1998 .

[4]  Matthew Flatt,et al.  PsyScope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers , 1993 .

[5]  J. Fodor,et al.  Semantic focus and sentence comprehension , 1979, Cognition.

[6]  J. Mehler,et al.  Monitoring the lexicon with normal and compressed speech: Frequency effects and the prelexical code. , 1990 .

[7]  A. Cutler.  Phoneme-monitoring reaction time as a function of preceding intonation contour , 1976 .

[8]  B. Tillmann,et al.  Effect of global structure and temporal organization on chord processing , 1999 .

[9]  B. Repp,et al.  Integration of melody and text in memory for songs , 1982, Cognition.

[10]  J. Bharucha,et al.  Implicit knowledge versus psychoacoustic similarity in priming of chords , 1998 .

[11]  Caroline Palmer,et al.  Linguistic prosody and musical meter in song , 1992 .

[12]  Ulrich H. Frauenfelder,et al.  Phoneme monitoring and lexical processing: Evidence for associative context effects , 1989, Memory & cognition.

[13]  The use of rhythm in attending to speech. , 1990 .

[14]  Anne Cutler,et al.  Phoneme identification and the lexicon , 1987, Cognitive Psychology.

[15]  E. Bigand,et al.  Perceiving musical stability: the effect of tonal structure, rhythm, and musical expertise. , 1997, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[16]  J. Bharucha,et al.  Priming of chords: Spreading activation or overlapping frequency spectra? , 1987, Perception & psychophysics.

[17]  M. R. Jones.  Dynamic pattern structure in music: Recent theory and research , 1987, Perception & psychophysics.

[18]  Barbara Tillmann,et al.  Effects of Global and Local Contexts on Harmonic Expectancy , 1998 .

[19]  M. Besson.  Meaning, structure, and time in language and music , 1998 .

[20]  A. Cutler,et al.  Detection of Target Phonemes in Spontaneous and Read Speech , 1988, Language and speech.

[21]  James G. Martin,et al.  Reaction Time to Phoneme Targets as a Function of Rhythmic Cues in Continuous Speech. , 1974 .

[22]  Lynne C. Nygaard,et al.  Contextual coherence and attention in phoneme monitoring , 1992 .

[23]  Isabelle Peretz,et al.  Processing Prosodic and Musical Patterns: A Neuropsychological Investigation , 1998, Brain and Language.

[24]  Jean E. Newman,et al.  Detecting phonemes in fluent speech , 1980 .

[25]  D Ingrisano,et al.  Phrase-level timing patterns in English: effects of emphatic stress location and speaking rate. , 1979, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[26]  Barbara Tillmann,et al.  Implicit learning of tonality: A self-organizing approach , 2000 .

[27]  R. Ilmoniemi,et al.  Functional Specialization of the Human Auditory Cortex in Processing Phonetic and Musical Sounds: A Magnetoencephalographic (MEG) Study , 1999, NeuroImage.

[28]  E. Bigand,et al.  Global context effects on musical expectancy , 1997, Perception & psychophysics.

[29]  J. Morton,et al.  Effect of word transitional probability on phoneme identification , 1976 .

[30]  K. Alho,et al.  Lateralized automatic auditory processing of phonetic versus musical information: A PET study , 2000, Human brain mapping.

[31]  J. Bharucha,et al.  Reaction time and musical expectancy: priming of chords. , 1986, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.