Published in: Cognition, Volume 174, May 2018, 1-18 Abstract “In his monograph Modularity of Mind (1983), philosopher Jerry Fodor argued that mental architecture can be partly decomposed into computational organs termed modules, which were characterized as having nine cooccurring features such as automaticity, domain specificity, and informational encapsulation. Do modules exist? Debates thus far have been framed very generally with few, if any, detailed case studies. The topic is important because it has direct implications on current debates in cognitive science and because it potentially provides a viable framework from which to further understand and make hypotheses about the mind’s structure… Read More
Musical competence and phoneme perception in a foreign language
Published in: Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Volume 24, Issue 6, December 2017, 1929-1934 Abstract “We investigated whether musical competence was associated with the perception of foreign-language phonemes. The sample comprised adult native-speakers of English who varied in music training. The measures included tests of general cognitive abilities, melody and rhythm perception, and the perception of consonantal contrasts that were phonemic in Zulu but not in English. Music training was associated positively with performance on the tests of melody and rhythm perception, but not with performance on the phoneme-perception task. In other words, we found no evidence for transfer of music training… Read More