Purpose: Pitch perception is important for speech sound learning, and reading acquisition requires integration of speech sounds and written letters. Many individuals with dyslexia exhibit auditory perception deficits that may therefore contribute to their reading impairment given that complex pitch perception is crucial for categorizing speech…

Addressing the disparate levels of aural skills that students may have acquired through their daily musical experiences prior to formal schooling can be difficult. Placement tests within the Western classical musical tradition typically involve structural decoding and formal concepts of elementary music theory. In this manuscript, we discuss the…

Research suggests that a central difficulty in dyslexia may be impaired rapid temporal processing. Good temporal processing is also needed for musical perception, which relies on the ability to detect rapid changes. Our study is the first to measure the perception of adults with and without dyslexia on all three dimensions of music (rhythm, pitch,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of pitch and rhythm priming tasks on sight-reading accuracy and fluency. High school wind instrumentalists (N = 182) were assigned to one of four experimental groups: pre-/posttest rhythm, pre-/posttest pitch, posttest-only rhythm, or posttest-only pitch. Participants sight-read selected…

Given the prevalent use of sight-reading in the classroom, at music festivals, and in audition procedures, it is important to know the most effective practices in preparing students to sight-read musical excerpts. Previous studies suggest that rhythm accuracy is a significant indicator of sight-reading ability. However, others have observed a…

In studies on auditory speech perception, participants are often asked to perform active tasks, e.g. decide whether the perceived sound is a speech sound or not. However, information about the stimulus, inherent in such tasks, may induce expectations that cause altered activations not only in the auditory cortex, but also in frontal areas such as…

Though auditory pitch is customarily mapped in Western cultures onto spatial verticality (high-low), both anthropological reports and cognitive studies suggest that pitch may be mapped onto a wide variety of other domains. We collected a total number of 35 pitch mappings and investigated in four experiments how these mappings are used and…

The authors examined how the structural attributes of tonality and meter influence musical pitch-time relations. Listeners heard a musical context followed by probe events that varied in pitch class and temporal position. Tonal and metric hierarchies contributed additively to the goodness-of-fit of probes, with pitch class exerting a stronger…

The musical priming paradigm has shown facilitated processing for tonally related over less-related targets. However, the congruence between tonal relatedness and the psychoacoustical properties of music challenges cognitive interpretations of the involved processes. Our goal was to show that cognitive expectations (based on listeners' tonal…

Regardless of the extremely subtle acoustic changes that are perceptible within almost all perception research studies, it is the total overall effect that generally occupies each individual listener. A long line of research indicates that many subtle "music changes" are often not perceived accurately and are actually mistakenly identified.…

Pitch constancy, perceiving the same pitch from tones with differing spectral shapes, requires one to extract the fundamental frequency from two sets of harmonics and compare them. We previously showed this difficult task to be easier when tonal context is present, presumably because the context creates a tonal reference point from which to judge…

This experiment investigated relational complexity and relational shift in judgments of auditory patterns. Pitch and duration values were used to construct two-note perceptually similar sequences (unary relations) and four-note relationally similar sequences (binary relations). It was hypothesized that 5-, 8- and 11-year-old children would perform…