The missing fundamentals of harmonic theory: Chord roots and their ambiguity in arrangements of jazz standards

Since Lippius and Rameau, chords have roots that are often voiced in the bass, doubled, and used as labels. Psychological experiments and analyses of databases of Western classical music have not produced clear evidence for the psychological reality of chord roots. We analyzed a symbolic database of 100 arrangements of jazz standards (musical instrument digital interface [MIDI] files from midkar.com and thejazzpage.de ). Selection criteria were representativeness and quality.The original songs had been composed in the 1930s and 1950s, and each file had a beat track. Files were converted to chord progressions by identifying tone onsets near beat locations (±10% of beat duration). Chords were classified as triads (major, minor, diminished, suspended) or seventh chords (major–minor, minor, major, half-diminished, diminished, and suspended) plus extra tones. Roots that were theoretically less ambiguous were more often in the bass or (to a lesser extent) doubled. The root of the minor triad was ambiguous, as predicted (conventional root or third). Of the sevenths, the major–minor had the clearest root. The diminished triad was often part of a major–minor seventh chord; the half-diminished seventh, of a dominant ninth. Added notes (“tensions”) tended to minimize dissonance (roughness or inharmonicity). In arrangements of songs from the 1950s, diminished triads and sevenths were less common, and suspended triads more common, relative to the 1930s. Results confirm the psychological reality of chord roots and their specific ambiguities. Results are consistent with Terhardt’s virtual pitch theory and the idea that musical chords emerge gradually from cultural and historic processes. The approach can enrich music theory (including pitch-class set analysis) and jazz pedagogy.

NS and NNS processing of idioms and nonidiom formulaic sequences: What can reaction times and think-alouds tell us?

Although researchers generally agree that native speakers (NSs) process formulaic sequences (FSs) holistically to some extent, findings about nonnative speakers (NNSs) are conflicting, potentially because not all FSs are psychologically equal or because in some studies NNSs may not have fully understood the FSs. We address these issues by investigating Chinese NSs and NNSs processing of idioms and matched nonidiom FSs in phrase acceptability judgment tasks with and without think-alouds (TAs). Reaction times show that NSs processed idioms faster than nonidioms regardless of length, but NNSs processed 3-character FSs faster than 4-character FSs regardless of type. TAs show NSs’ understanding of FSs has reached ceiling, but NNSs’ understanding was incomplete, with idioms being understood more poorly than nonidioms. Although we conclude that idioms and nonidioms have different mental statuses in NSs’ lexicons, it is inconclusive how they are represented by NNSs. TAs also show that NNSs employed various strategies to compensate for limited idiom knowledge, causing comparable processing speed for idioms and nonidioms. The findings highlight the importance of distinguishing subtypes of FSs and considering NNSs’ quality of understanding in discussions of the psychological reality of FSs.

Explicit Import Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of Explicatures

The main goal of this paper is to argue that the way explicitly communicated content is approached in leading pragmatic theories is flawed, since it is posited that explicature generation involves pragmatic enrichment of the decoded logical form of the utterance to full propositionality. This kind of enhancement postulated to underlie explicature generation appears to be theoretically inadequate and not to correspond to the psychological reality of utterance interpretation. Drawing on earlier critique of extant pragmatic positions on explicatures, mainly by Borg (2016) and Jary (2016), I add further arguments against modelling explicitly communicated import in the way leading verbal communication frameworks do. It is emphasized that the cognitively plausible theory of communicated meaning is compromised at the cost of theory-internal concerns.

Acoustics and Resonance in Poetry: The Psychological Reality of Rhyme in Baudelaire’s “Les Chats”

This article uses the term “psychological reality” in this sense: the extent to which the constructs of linguistic theory can be taken to have a basis in the human mind, i.e., to somehow be reflected in human cognitive structures. This article explores the human cognitive structures in which the constructs of phonetic theory may be reflected. The last section is a critique of the psychological reality of sound patterns in Baudelaire’s “Les Chats”, as discussed in three earlier articles. In physical terms, it defines “resonant” as “tending to reinforce or prolong sounds, especially by synchronous vibration”. In phonetic terms it defines “resonant” as “where intense precategorical auditory information lingers in short-term memory”. The effect of rhyme in poetry is carried by similar overtones vibrating in the rhyme fellows, resonating like similar overtones on the piano. In either case, we do not compare overtones item by item, just hear their synchronous vibration. I contrast this conception to three approaches: one that points out similar sounds of “internal rhymes”, irrespective of whether they may be contained within the span of short-term memory (i.e., whether they may have psychological relit); one that claims that syntactic complexity may cancel the psychological reality of “internal rhymes” (whereas I claim that it merely backgrounds rhyme); and one that found through an eye-tracking experiment that readers fixate longer on verse-final rhymes than on other words, assuming regressive eye-movement (I claim that rhyme is an acoustic not visual phenomenon; and that there is a tendency to indicate discontinuation by prolonging the last sounds in ordinary speech and blank verse too, as well as in music — where no rhyme is involved).

Metonymy

This article is concerned with metonymy as a cognitive mechanism underlying our best and worst instincts. In particular, I consider two seemingly opposite processes of metonymy: (1) conceptual bypassing of sensory percepts, which leads to an intuitive leap to abstract insights and judgments and (2) conceptual oversimplification of a social category by stereotyping. By directing attention to that which metonymy is apt to obscure, I encourage the reader to rethink existing models of metonymy that focus on its referential and mental access functions. I offer an complementary account of the functions of metonymy by arguing that mental simplism is central to conceptual bypassing and social stereotyping and by pointing out the social psychological reality of an expressive function of metonymy.

Coarticulation and learnability of transparent vowels in vowel harmony

The representations of transparent vowels in vowel harmony have been of interest to phonologists because of the challenges they pose for constraints on locality and complexity. One proposal is that transparent vowels in back vowel harmony may be intermediate between front and back. The present study uses two artificial language learning experiments to explore the psychological reality of acoustic differences in transparent vowels in back vs. front vowel contexts. Participants were exposed to a back/round vowel harmony language with a neutral vowel that was spliced so that the F2 was lower in back vowel contexts and higher in front vowel contexts (the Natural condition) or the reverse (the Unnatural condition). While only participants in the Natural condition of Experiment 1 were able to learn the behavior of the transparent vowel relative to a No-Training control, there was no difference between the Natural and Unnatural conditions. In Experiment 2, only participants in the Natural condition learned the vowel harmony pattern, though there were no significant differences between the two conditions. No condition successfully learned the behavior of the transparent vowel in Experiment 2. These results suggest that the effects of small differences in the F2 value of transparent back vowels on learnability are minimal.

#SportPsychMapping: An Exploratory Interview Framework for Sport and Exercise Psychology

The aim of this article is to present an exploratory interview framework called #SportPsychMapping that can serve as guidance to practitioners in exploring the psychological reality of individuals and collectives. To meet their aim, in this article, the authors address (a) the context in which the exploratory interview framework was developed, (b) the theoretical structure used to select topics and questions, (c) the structure of the interview, (d) the topics and questions in the central section of the interview, (e) the summary section of the interview, and (f) different ways the exploratory interview framework has been applied. The hallmarks of #SportPsychMapping are the structure that includes an opening, central, and summary section; the central section, in which external variables, biopsychological states and traits, and psychological skills are explored; and the summary section, where an individual map is created with key concepts and phrases that reflect the interviewee’s main responses.

Hope in Hopelessness: Appreciating “Waiting” as an Essential Device in Selected Plays of Beckett and Ahmad

This paper aims to explore and appreciate “waiting” as an essential device in selected plays of Beckett and Ahmad. They defy traditions and conventions of plays by inventing their own innovative and individualistic manner of manipulating structural patterns to shape the Absurd dramas. This paper focuses on the incessant incidence of the “waiting” in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Ahmad’s The Thing, and analyzes how important this waiting matters to the characters. The essential device of ‘waiting for’ and the open possibility of a change is what keeps hope alive. Through the journey of the characters, the playwrights focus on how man can confront and survive against the hostility of surroundings through ‘waiting.’ This is narrative research that follows descriptive-cum analytical method, and the textual references are given as evidence to support theargument of this study. It is found that the reality of the situation in which the absurd character appears is a psychological reality expressed in images that are the outward projection of states of their mind. That is why the Theatre of the Absurd can be considered an image of the human being’s inner world. It presents a truer picture of reality itself, reality as grasped by an individual that helps the characters as well as the audience to comprehend the harsh reality that life is full of qualms through their absurd conditions.

Statistical Evidence for Learnable Lexical Subclasses in Japanese

It has been proposed that the Japanese lexicon can be divided into etymologically defined sublexica on phonotactic and other grounds. However, the psychological reality of this sublexical analysis has been challenged by some authors who have appealed to putative problem with the learnability of the system. In this study, we apply a commonly used clustering method to Japanese words and show that there is robust statistical evidence for the sublexica and, thereby, that such sublexica are learnable. The model is able to recover phonotactic properties of sublexica previously discussed in the literature, and also reveals hitherto unnoticed phonotactic properties which are characteristic of sublexical membership and which can serve as a basis for future experimental investigations. The proposed approach is general and based purely on phonotactic information and thus can be applied to other languages.