The Auditory Stroop Interference and the Irrelevant Speech/Pitch Effect: Absolute-Pitch Listeners Can't Suppress Pitch Labeling

MIYAZAKI Ken'ichi
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, University of Niigata

Structured Session - Absolute Pitch
International Congress on Acoustis (ICA 2004), Aril 4-9, 2004 (Kyoto, Japan)

People with absolute pitch (AP) are assumed to be unique in operating an automatic verbal encoding when recognizing musical pitch. It is therefore assumed that tonal stimuli with musical pitch may produce a specific interference in performing certain tasks requiring some sort of verbal encoding. In the auditory Stroop experiment, participant heard sung syllables and required to name their musical pitch (pitch naming) or simply repeat the syllables (syllable shadowing). Listeners without AP suffered interference from incongruent syllables in pitch naming, but did not from incongruent pitches in syllable shadowing. In contrast, listeners with AP suffered substantial interference in shadowing syllables sung with incongruent pitch as well as in naming pitches sung with incongruent syllables. In the experiment of irrelevant sound effect, sequences of randomly-ordered seven musical-pitch syllables (mi, so, la, etc.) or digits were presented visually as to-be-recalled items. Irrelevant sounds (piano tones, spoken syllables, or spoken digits) accompanied the to-be-recalled items. Participants were required to recall the visual items in order as exactly as presented ignoring the auditory stimuli. Both listeners with and without AP showed the greatest substantial interference effect in recalling items with which irrelevant speech sounds accompanied. Most interestingly, the piano tones produced significantly greater interference for the listeners with AP than for the listeners without AP. These results support the assumption that listeners with AP can't suppress pitch labeling even when it brings disadvantages.