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The role of HG in the analysis of temporal iteration and interaural correlation
Investigating the effect of long-term musical experience on the auditory processing skills of young Maltese adults
Learning and practising a musical instrument has
recently been thought to ‘train’ the brain into processing sound
in a more refined manner.As a result, musicians experiencing
consistent exposure to musical practice have been suspected
to have superior auditory processing skills. This study aimed
to investigate this phenomenon within the Maltese context,
by testing two cohorts of young Maltese adults. Participants
in the musician cohort experienced consistent musical training
throughout their lifetime, while those in the non-musician
cohort did not have a history of musical training. A total of
24 Maltese speakers (14 musicians and 10 non-musicians) of
ages ranging between 19 and 31 years were tested for Frequency
Discrimination (FD), Duration Discrimination (DD), Temporal
Resolution (TR) and speech-in-noise recognition. The main
outcomes yielded by each cohort were compared and analysed
statistically. In comparison to the non-musician cohort, the
musicians performed in a slightly better manner throughout
testing. Statistical superiority was surprisingly only present in
the FD test. Although musicians displayed a degree of superiority
in performance on the other tests, differences in mean scores
were not statistically significant. The results yielded by this investigation
are to a degree coherent with implications of previous
research, in that the effect of long-term musical experience on
the trained cohort manifested itself in a slight superiority in performance
on auditory processing tasks. However, this difference
in scoring was not prominent enough to be statistically significant.peer-reviewe
Attachment preference in auditory German sentences: Individual differences and pragmatic strategy
Relative clauses modify a preceding element, but as this element can be flexibly located, the point of attachment is sometimes ambiguous. Preference for this attachment can vary within languages such as German, yet explanations for differences in attachment preference related to cognitive strategies or constraints have been conflicting in the current literature. The present study aimed to assess the preference for relative clause attachment among German listeners and whether these preferences could be explained by strategy or individual differences in working memory or musical rhythm ability. We performed a sentence completion experiment, conducted post hoc interviews, and measured working memory and rhythm abilities with diagnostic tests. German listeners had no homogeneous attachment preference, although participants consistently completed individual sentences across trials according to the general preference that they reported offline. Differences in attachment preference were moreover not linked to individual differences in either working memory or musical rhythm ability. However, the pragmatic content of individual sentences sometimes overrode the general syntactic preference in participants with lower rhythm ability. Our study makes an important contribution to the field of psycholinguistics by validating offline self-reports as a reliable diagnostic for an individual’s online relative clause attachment preference. The link between pragmatic strategy and rhythm ability is an interesting direction for future research
Implicit learning of recursive context-free grammars
Context-free grammars are fundamental for the description of linguistic syntax. However, most artificial grammar learning
experiments have explored learning of simpler finite-state grammars, while studies exploring context-free grammars have
not assessed awareness and implicitness. This paper explores the implicit learning of context-free grammars employing
features of hierarchical organization, recursive embedding and long-distance dependencies. The grammars also featured
the distinction between left- and right-branching structures, as well as between centre- and tail-embedding, both
distinctions found in natural languages. People acquired unconscious knowledge of relations between grammatical classes
even for dependencies over long distances, in ways that went beyond learning simpler relations (e.g. n-grams) between
individual words. The structural distinctions drawn from linguistics also proved important as performance was greater for
tail-embedding than centre-embedding structures. The results suggest the plausibility of implicit learning of complex
context-free structures, which model some features of natural languages. They support the relevance of artificial grammar
learning for probing mechanisms of language learning and challenge existing theories and computational models of
implicit learning
Earworms ("stuck song syndrome"): towards a natural history of intrusive thoughts
Two studies examine the experience of “earworms”, unwanted catchy tunes that repeat. Survey data show that the experience is widespread but earworms are not generally considered problematic, although those who consider music to be important to them report earworms as longer, and harder to control, than those who consider music as less important. The tunes which produce these experiences vary considerably between individuals but are always familiar to those who experience them. A diary study confirms these findings and also indicates that, although earworm recurrence is relatively uncommon and unlikely to persist for longer than 24 hours, the length of both the earworm and the earworm experience frequently exceed standard estimates of auditory memory capacity. Active attempts to block or eliminate the earworm are less successful than passive acceptance, consistent with Wegner’s (1994) theory of ironic mental control
Learning, Arts, and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition
Reports findings from multiple neuroscientific studies on the impact of arts training on the enhancement of other cognitive capacities, such as reading acquisition, sequence learning, geometrical reasoning, and memory
Long-Range Correlation Underlying Childhood Language and Generative Models
Long-range correlation, a property of time series exhibiting long-term
memory, is mainly studied in the statistical physics domain and has been
reported to exist in natural language. Using a state-of-the-art method for such
analysis, long-range correlation is first shown to occur in long CHILDES data
sets. To understand why, Bayesian generative models of language, originally
proposed in the cognitive scientific domain, are investigated. Among
representative models, the Simon model was found to exhibit surprisingly good
long-range correlation, but not the Pitman-Yor model. Since the Simon model is
known not to correctly reflect the vocabulary growth of natural language, a
simple new model is devised as a conjunct of the Simon and Pitman-Yor models,
such that long-range correlation holds with a correct vocabulary growth rate.
The investigation overall suggests that uniform sampling is one cause of
long-range correlation and could thus have a relation with actual linguistic
processes
An exploratory study of imagining sounds and “hearing” music in autism
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) reportedly possess preserved or superior music-processing skills compared to their typically developing counterparts. We examined auditory imagery and earworms (tunes that get “stuck” in the head) in adults with ASD and controls. Both groups completed a short earworm questionnaire together with the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale. Results showed poorer auditory imagery in the ASD group for all types of auditory imagery. However, the ASD group did not report fewer earworms than matched controls. These data suggest a possible basis in poor auditory imagery for poor prosody in ASD, but also highlight a separability between auditory imagery and control of musical memories. The separability is present in the ASD group but not in typically developing individuals
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