(Pierre Divenyi )

Subject: 
From:    Pierre Divenyi  <marva4!pdivenyi(at)UCDAVIS.EDU>
Date:    Tue, 26 Oct 1993 14:38:29 PDT

Re/Bruno Repp's note on national differences

How about Northern British subjects? Or Greek? Or Italian
(depending on where you want to spend your time testing subjects
or between testing subjects)?

With all my due respect to Diana (Deutsch) and Bruno (Repp),
I would like to suggest that there may be a vast number of
hypotheses to provide an explanation for any nationally-culturally
based difference in pitch perception, especially when the only
test object is an individual (and very subjective) response to the
Shepard tones. If I were them, I would ask myself which of the
many hypotheses are testable, and whether they are worth testing at
all. One possible hypothesis is just plain differences in
education and music listening habits. Language/dialect differences,
if they are the ones to blame, would be more likely to appear when
the comparison is between American subjects and Brits from areas where,
were they in a film, their utterances would need subtitles for US audiences.

        Pierre Divenyi