Abstract
This series of experiments dealt with discrimination between two temporal patterns differing only by the insertion of an additional silent gap. In Experiment 1, patterns varied in metric and figural structure. Metric structure is described as the sense of temporal regularity that may occur between subjectively accented tones. Figural structure is described as the grouping of temporally adjacent tones separated by silences. Standard patterns were either strongly or weakly metric; comparison patterns differed from the standards by the insertion of a silence that disrupted either the metric structure alone or both the metric and the figural structures. Experiment 1 provided support for the roles of both metric and figural structures and provided support for the clock-induction model of Povel and Essens (1985) as an account of metric processing. In Experiments 2–4, discrimination of patterns with differing metric structures but identical figural structures was examined more closely. Rate of presentation of the patterns was varied. Multiple regression indicated that, independent of rate variations, discrimination improved as the absolute (not relative) duration of the silent gap increased. We argue that an additional timing mechanism, independent of pattern structure, is operative in temporal pattern discrimination. All the results were replicated across levels of music training of the listeners.
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This paper was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l’Aide à la Recherche (Government of Quebec) to S.H. and by a research grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, awarded to L.L.C. Some of the results were presented at the meeting of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition held in Boston in 1997.
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Hébert, S., Cuddy, L.L. Detection of metric structure in auditory figural patterns. Perception & Psychophysics 64, 909–818 (2002). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196795
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196795