Auditory expectations for newly acquired structures

Our study investigated whether newly acquired auditory structure knowledge allows listeners to develop perceptual expectations for future events. For that aim, we introduced a new experimental approach that combines implicit learning and priming paradigms. Participants were first exposed to structured tone sequences without being told about the underlying artificial grammar. They then made speeded judgements on a perceptual feature of target tones in new sequences (i.e., in-tune/out-of-tune judgements). The target tones respected or violated the structure of the artificial grammar and were thus supposed to be expected or unexpected. In this priming task, grammatical tones were processed faster and more accurately than ungrammatical ones. This processing advantage was observed for an experimental group performing a memory task during the exposure phase, but was not observed for a control group, which was lacking the exposure phase (Experiment 1). It persisted when participants realized an in-tune/out-of-tune detection task during exposure (Experiment 2). This finding suggests that the acquisition of new structure knowledge not only influences grammaticality judgements on entire sequences (as previously shown in implicit learning research), but allows developing perceptual expectations that influence single event processing. It further promotes the priming paradigm as an implicit access to acquired artificial structure knowledge.