The development of mental models for auditory events : relational complexity and discrimination of pitch and duration

This experiment investigated relational complexity and relational shift in judgments of auditory patterns. Pitch and duration values were used to construct two-note perceptually similar sequences (unary relations) and four-note relationally similar sequences (binary relations). It was hypothesized that 5-, 8-and 11-year-old children would perform unary level pitch and duration discrimination tasks accurately. Relational shift predicted a poorer performance of the younger age groups on binary relation tasks; relational primacy predicted no effect of age. Accuracy was operationalized as a discrimination index (DI: hit rate minus false alarm rate). Results supported relational shift: DI for all age groups exceeded chance on unary and binary relation tasks, with significantly poorer performance by all age groups on binary relation tasks. The 5-years age group showed evidence of perceptual similarity. Relational complexity of auditory dimensions and tasks, and manipulation of domain specific musical knowledge in evaluating theories of relational processing, are discussed.