Re: pitch discrimination

[Athanassios Protopapas <protopap@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Dr. Watson and List,

Someone please kick me if I'm dragging on too long (I guess I'm interested
in this stuff).  The 'g' issue is extremely interesting and in fact I
started reading about 'g' after I saw the results of our psychoacoustic
measurements.  So in this sense you're right on the mark.  On the other
hand there's a group of measures that cluster together very strongly, a
more encompassing group clustering sort of, and a bunch of measures not
related to the above (unfortunately 50-100 subjects are not enough for a
serious factor analysis of so many measures---yes I tried and it doesn't
work).  So the question is what makes reading ability cluster strongly
with, say, frequency representation, less with loudness representation,
and not at all with gap detection?   Similar questions arise with a
nonverbal intelligence measure which also groups with some but certainly
not all of the psychoacoustic measures and not as strongly as (non)word
reading does.

There's something interesting there beyond 'g' (which, BTW, seems to be an
offensive word in the psychological literature nowadays thanks to zealots
of the JJ Gould sort but that's a-whole-nother can of worms).

With respect to individual differences and group correlations: Yes and
yes. That is, I wouldn't despise either.  In the Norfolk, VA ASA meeting
I presented data on 54 normally developing schoolchildren for whom
backward detection masking was correlated (.42) with their language score
(CELF-3 receptive language quotient).  The masking task was similar
(identical in stimulus properties, different in interface and adaptive
procedure) to the one used by Wright et al who showed very substantial
differences between normal and language impaired children (Nature 387:176,
1997).  That is, there is a general tendency/relationship there which even
spans the (arbitrary) boundary betwen "normal" and "impaired" and pretty
much holds across the board.  So something can be said for group
correlations.

Then again this same measure does not correlate significantly with reading
ability in adults.  There goes the clean story down the drain along with
the 'g' factor :-)

I guess you've had enough of me for this year---I'm crawling back under
my rock now.

Thanassi Protopapas