Prosodic and
Musical Discrimination Tasks

Linguistic and musical discrimination tasks required participants to decide whether the stimuli within a pair were the "same" or "different". MR performed within the normal range for all linguistic tasks, indicating preserved speech prosody representation. His performance for musical discrimination stimuli was not significantly different from the comparison group except for the Emphasis-shift musical pairs (see Table 2.7). This indicates that MR was unable to use internal contour cues to facilitate his performance, which is consistent with his impaired performance on melodic contour tasks based on internal contour differences. Although MR's performance fell within the normal range for the musical Timing-shift condition, a chi-square goodness-of-fit one-way test revealed that his score was not significantly better than chance (Χ2 ≤ 2.00, ns), indicating that he was unable to reliably discriminate between rhythmic stimuli. This result is consistent with his impaired rhythmic ability on musical tasks (Beckwith, 2003). Examination of MR's scores across the Statement- question and Emphasis-shift melodic tasks highlighted a disproportionately large amount of errors (66.6%) for identical melodic pairs, which MR perceived as different. This finding was also apparent for MR's musical assessment on Trehub et al.'s (1984) identical melodic contour pairs, pointing to a low level perceptual problem.

Table 2.7

Percentage of Correct Responses for Patel et al.'s (1998) Prosodic and Musical Discrimination Tasks

a Data based on 12 controls, matched for age to MR (taken from Nicholson et al., 2003)
*p < 0.05

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