Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between pitch rehearsal and phonological rehearsal with regard to working memory. We conducted a dual-task experiment using musical tones and speech sounds. A standard-comparison task was the primary task and a suppression task was the secondary task. The participants were asked to engage in articulatory or musical suppression while they maintain speech sounds (phonological information) or musical tones (pitch information). Under articulatory suppression, the participants were asked to say “a, i, u” repeatedly; under musical suppression, they were asked to hum in three pitches (e.g., do, re, mi) repeatedly. The results revealed that articulatory suppression decreased the performance of recognition of phonological information but not of pitch information. Moreover, musical suppression decreased the performance of recognition of pitch information but not of phonological information. This implies that ariticulatory suppression selectively interfered with the rehearsals of speech sounds, and musical supersession selectively interfered with the rehearsals of musical tones. Consequently, the results suggest that pitch rehearsal is independent from phonological rehearsal.
