A recent study (Kuhn & Dienes, 2005, Implicit learning of non-local musical rules : Implicitly learning more than chunks. Journal of Experimental Psychology : Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31, 1417-1432.) reported that participants previously exposed to a set of musical tunes generated by a biconditional grammar subsequently preferred new tunes respecting the grammar over new ungrammatical tunes. Because study and test tunes did not share any chunks of adjacent intervals, this result may be construed as straightforward evidence for the implicit learning of a structure that was only governed by non-local dependency rules. We show here that the grammar modified the statistical distribution of perceptually salient musical events, such as the probability that tunes covered an entire octave. When the influence of these confounds was removed, the effect of grammaticality disappeared.
Implicit learning of nonlocal musical rules: A comment on Kuhn and Dienes (2005)
