Discussion

A significant priming effect was observed in Experiment 2: processing was facilitated for in-tune mediants over in-tune leading tones. An interactive pattern reminiscent of the one in Experiment 1a emerged: the tonal context effect reversed (not significantly) for out-of-tune targets. This interactive pattern can be expected from the harmonic priming studies using the intonation task: Processing was faster for related in-tune target chords than for less-related in-tune target chords, while this difference was smaller or reversed for out-of-tune chords (Bharucha & Stoeckig, 1987; Bigand & Pineau, 1997). This difference between in-tune and out-of-tune chords has been attributed to a response bias. The difference between in-tune and out-of-tune tones in our data can be similarly explained. Participants may be biased to judge less-related targets as out-of-tune because less-related targets and out-of-tune targets are both incongruent with the context. In addition to this response bias, the difference between in-tune and out-of-tune targets may be explained by out-of-tune targets being deviant music events, thus being less integrated into the context and less influenced by tonal relatedness.