Phoneme versus word recognition.

[Al Bregman <al.bregman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear list ,

A graduate student at McGill has done some research with narrow band noises
of ambiguous pitch, showing that people are good at identifying melodies
made of these types of notes, even though they are poor at matching the
pitch of the individual notes.  I thought that there might be some relation
to the "word superiority effect" in reading (we have many references) and in
speech perception.  On the latter topic we have been able to find only one
article, Norris & Cutler (1988).  Does anyone know of other examples of the
superiority of recognizing a larger unit, even though there is a lot of
uncertainty about the component units?  Are there examples in music?

We would appreciate any information on this topic.

- Al
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Albert S. Bregman, FRSC
Emeritus Professor
Dept. of Psychology, McGill University
1205 Docteur Penfield Ave.
Montreal, QC  Canada  H3A 1B1

Office Tel: (514) 398-6103, Fax -4896
Home Tel. & Fax: (514) 484-2592
E-mail: al.bregman@mcgill.ca
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