Ong Jia Hoong, Burnham Denis, Stevens Catherine J
The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour & Development, Western Sydney University.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2017 Jan;43(1):150-157. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000286. Epub 2016 May 5.
Because different musical scales use different sets of intervals and, hence, different musical pitches, how do music listeners learn those that are in their native musical system? One possibility is that musical pitches are acquired in the same way as phonemes, that is, via distributional learning, in which learners infer knowledge from the distributional structure of their input. In this study, we investigate whether novel musical pitch can be acquired distributionally. Nonmusician adults were trained on a continuum spanning a novel musical chord minimal pair (i.e., a novel chord and a mistuned version of that chord) in which the continuum was presented either in a bimodal distribution, with a modal peak at each end of the continuum, or in a unimodal distribution, with a single central modal peak. Discrimination of target minimal pairs was assessed before and after exposure to the distribution. Distributional learning would be said to occur if learners in the bimodal condition, but not those in the unimodal condition, showed evidence of learning, as indexed by improvement in discriminating the minimal pair from pretest to posttest. This indeed was the outcome, suggesting that the building blocks of musical melody-musical pitch-can be acquired using distributional learning. (PsycINFO Database Record
由于不同的音阶使用不同的音程集合，因此具有不同的音高，音乐听众是如何学习其本土音乐体系中的音高的呢？一种可能性是，音高的习得方式与音素相同，即通过分布学习，学习者从输入的分布结构中推断知识。在本研究中，我们调查了新的音高是否可以通过分布学习获得。非音乐家成年人在一个跨越新的音乐和弦最小对（即一个新和弦及其走音版本）的连续体上接受训练，其中连续体以双峰分布呈现，在连续体的两端各有一个模态峰值，或者以单峰分布呈现，有一个单一的中心模态峰值。在接触该分布之前和之后评估对目标最小对的辨别能力。如果双峰条件下的学习者（而非单峰条件下）表现出学习迹象，即从测试前到测试后辨别最小对的能力有所提高，那么就可以说发生了分布学习。这确实是研究结果，表明音乐旋律的基本要素——音高——可以通过分布学习获得。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
