Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Publication Date
Spring 5-1-2024
Journal
Undergraduate Honours Theses
Abstract
The influence of different productive mechanisms that support the Statistical Learning (SL) of spoken language has been highly discussed in the psychology literature (see for review, Isbilen & Christiansen, 2022). The present research examined the effect of musical entrainment on SL of auditory-linguistic stimuli in two experiments. Experiment 1 examined whether training participants to tap to specific beats could impact their ability to learn nonsense tri-syllabic words using an online paradigm. Participants were 99 adults recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk and randomly assigned and trained to entrain to one of three time signature conditions: 3/4, 4/4, or 12/8. After that, tested in their ability to track tri-syllabic words through a target detection (TD) task and a forced-choice (FC) task. Although participants across all groups performed above chance in the both task, no significant effect of specific time signature entrainment on SL of tri-syllabic words was found, F(2, 59) = 2.63, p = .081, η_p^2 = .08. Experiment 2 was a quasi-replication of Experiment 1 and further explored whether musical entrainment can impact SL of tri-syllabic words in a more experimentally controlled in-person paradigm. Thirty-four undergraduate students from Huron University College, London, ON were recruited to participate and went through a similar testing process to Experiment 1, which included small modifications to account for control and variability of testing materials. Although participants across all groups performed again above chance in the TD and FC tasks, no significant effect of specific time signature entrainment on SL of tri-syllabic words was found, F(2, 59) = 2.63, p = .081, η_p^2 = .08. Implications of findings and directions for future research are discussed.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Notes
Thesis Advisor(s): Dr. Christine Tsang and Dr. Stephen Van Hedger