Perception and Production
Research Questions:
How does what you hear influence your subsequent performance? Is your performance rate influenced by the rate of what you hear? Do listeners persist in the pitches and intensity patterns found in music and speech?
Previous research:
Previous research demonstrated persistence of rate in music and speech (Jungers, Palmer, and Speer, 2002). Listeners' productions showed influences of both their regular speaking/playing rate and the rate of the melody/sentence they heard prior to production.
Current research:
We are testing the persistence effects of listening to other prosodic dimensions on the performance of metrically ambiguous melodies. We are also testing the persistence effects of perceived prosodic pitch patterns on speakers' utterances. We plan to extend these findings to conversational speech. How does one speaker's prosody influence the prosody of the second speaker when exchanging information in a conversational context? Likewise, if two musicians are performing together, how do the prosodic aspects in the performance (pitch, accent, rhythm) by one musician influence the performance by the second musician?