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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Medicine and Health Sciences

Western University

2021

Perception

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Musical Instrument Familiarity Affects Statistical Learning Of Tone Sequences., Stephen C Van Hedger, Ingrid Johnsrude, Laura J Batterink Nov 2021

Musical Instrument Familiarity Affects Statistical Learning Of Tone Sequences., Stephen C Van Hedger, Ingrid Johnsrude, Laura J Batterink

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Most listeners have an implicit understanding of the rules that govern how music unfolds over time. This knowledge is acquired in part through statistical learning, a robust learning mechanism that allows individuals to extract regularities from the environment. However, it is presently unclear how this prior musical knowledge might facilitate or interfere with the learning of novel tone sequences that do not conform to familiar musical rules. In the present experiment, participants listened to novel, statistically structured tone sequences composed of pitch intervals not typically found in Western music. Between participants, the tone sequences either had the timbre of artificial, …


Intelligibility Benefit For Familiar Voices Does Not Depend On Better Discrimination Of Fundamental Frequency Or Vocal Tract Length, Emma Holmes, Ingrid Johnsrude Jan 2021

Intelligibility Benefit For Familiar Voices Does Not Depend On Better Discrimination Of Fundamental Frequency Or Vocal Tract Length, Emma Holmes, Ingrid Johnsrude

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Speech is more intelligible when it is spoken by familiar than unfamiliar people. Two cues to voice identity are glottal pulse rate (GPR) and vocal tract length (VTL): perhaps these features are more accurately represented for familiar voices in a listener’s brain. If so, listeners should be able to discriminate smaller manipulations to perceptual correlates of these vocal parameters for familiar than unfamiliar voices. We recruited pairs of friends who had known each other for 0.5–22.5 years. We measured thresholds for discriminating pitch (correlate of GPR) and formant spacing (correlate of VTL; ‘VTL-timbre’) for voices that were familiar (friends) and …