000006-implicit-learning-of-nonlocal-musical-rules-a-comment-on-kuhn -and-dienes-2005

Journal of Experimental Psychology: © 2009 American Psychological AssociationLearning, Memory, and Cognition 0278-7393/09/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a00142782009, Vol. 35, No. 1, 299–305COMMENTARYImplicit Learning of Nonlocal Musical Rules:A Comment on Kuhn and Dienes (2005)Charlotte Desmet Be´ne´dicte Poulin-Charronnat, Philippe Lalitte,Universite´ de Bourgogne and Ghent University and Pierre PerruchetUniversite´ de Bourgogne andCentre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueIn a recent study, G. Kuhn and Z. Dienes (2005) reported that participants previously exposed to a setof musical tunes generated by a biconditional grammar subsequently preferred new tunes that respectedthe grammar over new ungrammatical tunes. Because the study and test tunes did not share any chunksof adjacent intervals, this result may be construed as straightforward evidence for the implicit learningof a structure that was only governed by nonlocal dependency rules. It is shown here that the grammarmodified the statistical distribution of perceptually salient musical events, such as the probability thattunes covered an entire octave. When the influence of these confounds was removed, the effect ofgrammaticality disappeared.Keywords: biconditional grammar, nonadjacent dependencies, rule, abstraction, musicMuch of what people learn about complex rule-governed rule abstraction but to the learning of low-level regularities thatdomains such as language and music is acquired incidentally, ...