Dr Tamara Rathcke from the Department of English Language & Linguistics has recently co-authored a paper exploring the link between memory, music and language in the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (JEP: HPP), which has been highlighted in the September issue of Particularly Exciting Experiments in Psychology, the research round-up by the American Psychological Association.
Repetition can boost memory and perception. However, repeating the same stimulus several times in immediate succession also induces intriguing perceptual transformations and illusions.
Tamara, and her co-authors Simone Falk and Simone Dalla Bella, investigated the ‘Speech to Song Transformation’ (S2ST), a massed repetition effect which crosses the boundaries between language and music, where a phrase repeated several times shifts to being heard as sung.
To better understand this unique cross-domain transformation, the authors examined the role of acoustics. In two experiments, the effects of two pitch properties and three rhythmic properties on the probability and speed of occurrence of the transformation were examined. Results showed that both pitch and rhythm are key features fostering the transformation. However, some properties proved to be more conducive to the transformation than others.
Overall, the study demonstrated that repetition enables listeners to reinterpret specific prosodic features of spoken utterances in terms of musical structures. The findings underline a tight link between language and music, but they also reveal important differences in communicative functions.
The article is entitled ‘When Speech Sounds Like Music’ and appears in the August issue, JEP:HPP 40 (2014), pp1491-1506. Aeon, the online cultural magazine has explained some of the background of the phenomenon here: aeon.co/magazine/culture/why-we-love-repetition-in-music
The original journal can be accessed here:
www.apa.org/pubs/journals/xhp/index.aspx
The Particularly Exciting Experiments in Psychology article can be found here:
www.apa.org/pubs/highlights/peeps/issue-29.aspx