A perceptual experiment investigated the structural and expressive mappings between music and dance. The Stimulus materials were based on the Minuetto from W. A. Mozart's Divertimento No. 15 choreographed by George Balanchine. Participants were assigned to one of three conditions: Music Only, Dance Only, and Both Music and Dance. They performed four on-line tasks: indicating the occurrence of section ends and new ideas, and judging the amount of tension and emotion expressed. Each of the tasks showed strong similarity across the three conditions, including the Music Only and the Dance Only conditions which contained none of the same Stimulus materials. Analysis of the music and dance uncovered a large variety of elements that define mappings between music and dance. These operate on different hierarchical levels and suggest non-accidental relationships between music and bodily movement. The Both Music and Dance condition could be predicted as a combination of the Music Only and Dance Only conditions, with a stronger contribution of the former. The findings for this excerpt suggest an additive, non-interactive relationship between the music and dance. All three conditions exhibited the same temporal pattern among the tasks. New ideas were introduced at section beginnings when levels of tension and emotion expressed were low. These levels tended to increase within sections, reaching a peak just before section ends. These results suggest that a general Schema of temporal Organization operates in both music and dance. Finally, the three conditions produced very similar judgments of the type of emotional response, supporting the idea that both music and dance can engage similar representations of emotions.

A series of experiments was conducted to determine the properties that contribute to fricative perception. Listeners’ identification of English fricatives based on fricative-vowel syllables and on isolated fricative noise portions reveals the perceptual salience of each fricative and the extent to which fricative-to-vowel transitions contribute to identification. Two further experiments specifically address perception of the nonsibilant fricatives, which, it has been claimed, may be based more on semantic or facial factors. One experiment investigates how a semantically matching or mismatching precursor affects perception of minimal pairs (e.g., fin-thin). A second experiment determines the extent to which auditory and/or visual information each contribute to fricative perception. Moreover, regression of these perceptual data on acoustic measurements, including noise duration, amplitude, relative amplitude, spectral peak location, spectral moments, and locus equations [see Jongman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 103, 3086A (1998)], indicates which acoustic properties play a significant role in fricative perception. [Work supported by NIH.]

R-nt linguistic theories propose that prosodic contour tictions to facilitate encoding, processing, and storing of information in the speech signal. To date, most evidenm for these theories comes from studies of infant perwption and prmssing of prosodic speeeh. The present studyemployeda short-term memory CV nonsense syllable rdl task in order to attempt to replicate with addts the findings for infants that have supported these theories. 42 adult subjmts listened to nonsense CVS in two sets, one presented with sentential prosodic mntour, the other presented in list form, and rmlled as many syllables, in order, from mch string as they could. Results were significant at the~. 02 level and supported the hypothesis that subjects would better redl those syllable strings presented in prosodic mntour, as the number of errors was fewer for the prosodic set than for the list set, Familiarity/order of presentation effeets and individual differenws were found for all subjects. These results suggest that 1) adults uw prmssing and coding strategies similar to those employed by infants in re~nse to linguistic stimuli; and 2) sentential prosody does, in fact, facilitate short-term memory for these stimuli, possibly by enhancing the perceptual diency of the linguistic input.