Eye Movement in Music Reading - Stimulus Familiarity

Stimulus Familiarity

The more familiar readers become with a musical excerpt, the less their reliance on visual input from the score and the correspondingly greater reliance on their stored memory of the music. On logical grounds, it would be expected that this shift would result in fewer and longer fixations. The data from all three studies into eye movement in the reading of increasingly familiar music support this reasoning. York's (1952) participants read each stimulus twice, with each reading preceded by a 28-second silent preview. On average, both skilled and unskilled readers used fewer and longer fixations during the second reading. Goolsby's (1987) participants were observed during three immediately successive readings of the same musical stimulus. Familiarity in these trials appeared to increase fixation duration, but not nearly as much as might have been expected. The second reading produced no significant difference in mean fixation duration (from 422 to 418 ms). On the third encounter, mean fixation duration was higher for both groups (437 ms) but by a barely significant amount, thus mildly supporting York's earlier finding. The smallness of these changes might be explained by the unchallenging reading conditions in the trials. The tempo of MM120 suggested at the start of each of Goolsby's trials appears to be slow for tackling the given melodies, which contained many semibreves and minims, and there may have simply been insufficient pressure to produce significant results. A more likely explanation is that the participants played the stimuli at faster tempos as they grew more familiar with them through the three readings. (The metronome was initially sounded, but was silent during the performances, allowing readers to vary their pace at will.) Thus, it is possible that two influences were at odds with each other: growing familiarity may have promoted low numbers of fixations, and long fixation durations, while faster tempo may have promoted low numbers and short durations. This might explain why mean fixation duration fell in the opposite direction to the prediction for the second encounter, and by the third encounter had risen by only 3.55% across both groups. (Smith's (1988) results, reinforced by those of Kinsler & Carpenter (1995), suggest that faster tempos are likely to reduce both the number and duration of fixations in the reading of a single-line melody. If this hypothesis is correct, it may be connected with the possibility that the more familiar a stimulus, the less the workload on the reader's memory.)