Statistical Learning

Researching the Phenomena

The typical way that such phenomena are studied is through constructing small artificial grammars, the transition probabilities of which are precisely controlled. Participants are first trained on stimuli constructed with these grammars, and are then tested with grammatical and nongrammatical sequences to determine whether or not the statistical properties of transition probabilities in the grammar have been learned, so that sequences can be correctly categorized as grammatical or not. Such studies have demonstrated that 8-month-old infants learn and make use of such statistical information in making use of speech sounds; adults show similar abilities.

With these findings in regard to language as heard, the potential parallels to learning about musical structures were obvious to researchers. [Page 1068]Melodies were the first musical materials to be studied; because they employ sequences of single sounds, much like speech, they provide a good parallel. Musical tones were combined into small units called “tone words” by the authors—musicians would call such units motives, figures, or gestures—whose inter- and intraword transition probabilities were the same as those in the earlier speech stimuli. Results statistically indistinguishable from those of the earlier study were obtained with both infants and adults, suggesting that inducing regularities from the transition probabilities was a general property of human auditory cognition, underlying both speech and music perception.

Later studies have extended this approach in a variety of ways. For example, researchers have examined listeners' ability to learn a new kind of musical idiom by constructing melodic stimuli in a newly created microgrammar, using a scale quite different from any to which their adult listeners would have been exposed and enculturated. After about 30 minutes of passive exposure, participants not only exhibited learning of specific melodies, but also generalization of the grammar, distinguishing between novel grammatical melodies and lures, using a similar but different grammar.

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