Abstract
The recognition of sound patterns in speech or music (e.g., a melody that is played in different keys) requires knowledge about pitch relations between successive sounds. We investigated the formation of regularity representations for sound patterns in an event-related potential (ERP) study. A pattern, which consisted of six concatenated 50 ms tone segments differing in fundamental frequency, was presented 1, 2, 3, 6, or 12 times and then replaced by another pattern by randomly changing the pitch of the tonal segments (roving standard paradigm). In an absolute repetition condition, patterns were repeated identically, whereas in a transposed condition, only the pitch relations of the tonal segments of the patterns were repeated, while the entire patterns were shifted up or down in pitch. During ERP measurement participants were not informed about the pattern repetition rule, but were instructed to discriminate rarely occurring targets of lower or higher sound intensity. EPRs for pattern changes (mismatch negativity, MMN; and P3a) and for pattern repetitions (repetition positivity, RP) revealed that the auditory system is able to rapidly extract regularities from unfamiliar complex sound patterns even when absolute pitch varies. Yet, enhanced RP and P3a amplitudes, and improved behavioral performance measured in a post-hoc test, in the absolute as compared with the transposed condition suggest that it is more difficult to encode patterns without absolute pitch information. This is explained by dissociable processing of standards and deviants as well as a back propagation mechanism to early sensory processing stages, which is effective after less repetitions of a standard stimulus for absolute pitch.
Highlights
Meaningful units in speech and music are typically characterized by the relative composition of certain acoustic features
Using a roving standard paradigm, we investigated, whether regularity extraction and change detection for complex spectrotemporal stimuli relies on absolute pitch information or on relative pitch information, tolerating shifts in absolute pitch as long as pitch relations were kept constant
Pattern changes compared to pattern repetitions elicited an mismatch negativity (MMN) and a subsequent P3a component, which appeared with their typical time course in both conditions comparable to previous studies using auditory oddball [37,60,61,62,63] and roving standard paradigms [18,19,21,26]
Summary
Meaningful units in speech and music are typically characterized by the relative composition of certain acoustic features. In speech, it is the relative values of the formants that define individual vowels, or in music, it is the proportional pitch relations between single notes that are among other factors crucial to identify a melodic theme. Formation of regularity representations of transposed sound patterns and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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