Presentation
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Music to my ears (and fingers): Investigating causal effects of verbal vs. musical labels on tactile discrimination
Poster A50 in Poster Session A, Thursday, October 6, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm EDT, Millennium Hall
Tally McCormick Miller1,2, Friedemann Pulvermüller1,2,3,4; 1Brain Language Laboratory, Freie Universität Berlin, 2Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 3Einstein Center for Neurosciences, Berlin, 4Cluster of Excellence ‘Matters of Activity. Image Space Material’, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Can language affect the nature of our perception? How much of our perception is shaped by our own language? These questions were investigated using a controlled, within-subject experimental design, where participants associated fine-grained, difficult-to-distinguish tactile patterns on their fingertips with pseudowords and with tones, respectively. Their discrimination ability was tested both before and after the associative learning, to test if there was indeed a difference in their discrimination abilities. Associating a specific tactile pattern to a verbal label such as “fromp,” while at the same time associating a similar tactile pattern to a different verbal label, such as “schpepf”, may communicate to the learner that, though they share commonalities, these two tactile patterns are indeed distinct.Would, however, musical sequences of tones work as well as language-like stimuli? To address this question, we used tactile patterns, and paired them either with verbal, language-like labels or with matched musical sequences, testing participants’ ability to discriminate the tactile patterns both before and after. Tactile patterns were divided into two equally matched sets, and each set was presented systematically and consistently with unique, but task-irrelevant, auditory stimuli. All participants had equal exposure to all verbal and nonverbal stimuli as well as all tactile patterns throughout the study. After five days of exposure, participants showed an overall discrimination improvement in both categories, indicating that this facilitative effect is not limited to creating implicit associations between tactile patterns and verbal labels. There was, however, a significantly greater improvement for patterns which were paired with verbal labels when compared to the patterns paired with non-verbal, tonal sequences, indicating that spoken language may still indeed have an advantage over non-spoken auditory input.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception, Multisensory or Sensorimotor Integration