The Effect of Item Position on the
Likelihood of Identification by
Inference in Prose Reading and
Music Reading*
JOHN A. SLOBODA
University ofKeele, England
ABSTRACT
Readers were presented with verbal and musical
texts which contained spelling and notational
errors respectively. Measures of detection in
normal unpaced reading situations showed that
errors were least likely to be detected when they
occurred in the middle of words or musical
phrases, demonstrating that the highest propor-
tion of inferences occurred at these positions.
The apparent similarities of the effects in music
and language reading suggested that inference
of interior elements usually results from struc-
tural rather than visual factors.
Ever since the classic demonstrations of
Pillsbury (1897) it has seemed incontrover-
tible that inference plays a large part in the
reading process. Readers appear to use
contextual information to augment, and
even supplant, information from the
printed word. Inferences can operate at
many levels; thus readers may use know-
ledge about the likelihood of particular
words or letter combinations to make infer-
ences about individual letters (Morton,
1964; Thompson & Massaro, 1973; Estes,
1975), or they may use their knowledge of
grammar and semantics to make inferences
about whole words or groups of words (e.g.
Kolers, 1966). This study is concerned with
inferences at the sub-word level. Much of
*This research was undertaken while the author was in receipt of a Medical Research Council studentship at its
Developmental Psychology Unit, London. The experiments reported here formed part of an unpublished
doctoral thesis for the University of London. Requests for reprints should be sent to J. Sloboda, Department of
Psychology, University of Keele, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, England.
228 Canad. J. Psychol./Rev. Canad. Psychol., 1976,30 (4)
the evidence for such a process comes from
studies in which the material to be iden-
tified is presented for a restricted duration.
Morton (1964) had subjects identify words
after brief exposures which had been pre-
ceded either by an appropriate sentence
context or by no such context. He found
that context, when appropriate, aided iden-
tification, and that errors tended to be more
likely in the given context than the stimulus
word. Many errors had visual resemblance
to the stimulus, and 'the largest category of
(visual) error consisted of correctly iden-
tifying the beginning and end of a word,
while incorrectly identifying the interior
letters.' This pattern was accounted for on
the basis of a suggestion of Woodworth
(1938) that interior letters in a sequence
are subject to visual masking. Although
Woodworth supposed this effect to occur
only in peripheral vision, it seems that con-
ditions of brief exposure permit the effect
to be demonstrated in central vision (Shaw,
1969; Estes & Wolford, 1971). Inference,
on such an account, compensates for loss of
visual information from word interiors by
using, whether consciously or uncon-
sciously, knowledge about various kinds of
transitional probability.
This explanation does not, however,
offer a prima facie reason for situations
where exposure duration for any particular
word is under the control of the reader. In
such a situation, it may be argued, the
reader has no need to use inferences since
the interior letters of words are easily iden-
tified. The aim of the first experiment re-
ported here is to discover whether readers
make inferences about interior letters in
words in a normal unpaced prose reading
situation.
EXPERIMENT I
Weber (1970), in a study of oral reading
errors made by young children, found that
subjects frequently made errors of word
substitution which indicated that they were
using only some of the graphic cues availa-
ble to them. For instance, the word 'family'
might be misread as 'funny,' or the word
'bumped' as 'banged.' These examples de-
monstrate a feature considered important
by Weber: the correct registration of initial
and final letters. Marchbanks and Levin
(1965) have proposed that children use
these outside letters as particularly salient
cues for identification, and have shown that
pre-school children tend to match letter-
strings when outer letters are identical,
even if inner letters are different.
At first sight, it would seem that adult
readers cannot be using such a selection
strategy, since they make very few errors in
oral reading. However, it may be argued
that a highly skilled use of grammatical and
semantic context allows errors to be
avoided even though some interior letters
in words are not fully analysed. To examine
this suggestion it is necessary to cause adult
readers to make more errors than they
normally would. The method chosen in this
case was to include in a text items which
closely resembled, but in fact were not,
words. These items were generated by
transposing the order of two adjacent let-
ters within a word (e.g. 'before' might be-
come 'beofre'). Recent work of Estes (1975)
has suggested that positional uncertainty
about letters is a major source of error in
word recognition. It may be supposed,
therefore, that transpositions of letters
within words will be harder to detect than,
say, letter substitutions. If readers often
identify words without full analysis of in-
terior letters, then transpositions occurring
at these interior positions should be less
well detected than transpositions occurring
at either end of words.
METHOD
Stimulus Materials
A simple narrative passage of 354 words was
Item position and identification by inference in prose and music reading
chosen, and 36 words, each containing six or
more letters, were selected for experimental
manipulation. A word was altered in one of
three ways: the first two letters were transposed,
the last two letters were transposed, or a middle
pair of letters was transposed. For six-letter
words (n = 15) letters 3 and 4 were taken as
middle letters (except where letters 3 and 4 were
the same). For seven-letter words (n = 15) letters
3 and 4 or letters 4 and 5 were taken as middle
letters on equal numbers of occasions. Three
versions of the passage were prepared, each con-
taining 13 of each type of alteration such that
each word received all three possible transposi-
tions across the versions. Each subject was tested
on one version only, but equal numbers of sub-
jects were tested using each version. The texts
were typed with single spacing and about 11
words to the line.
It was decided not to have subjects practise on
this task, since they may have developed a
strategy for detecting transpositions which was
unlike their normal reading behaviour. By pre-
senting each subject with only one short passage
it was intended that the experiment would
be over before the subject had significantly
changed his reading strategies. It may be argued
that the instruction to look out for errors will in
itself significantly alter reading strategies, but it
was hoped that the instructions would simply
obtain a record of the errors which the subject
would have noticed regardless of instructions.
The task seems hardly different from that of a
teacher reading a student's essay. He may notice
and mark spelling errors, but it is not always the
case that he was looking for them.
Procedure
Each subject was tested individually and his per-
formance recorded on tape. The subject was
instructed to begin reading the passage aloud as
soon as it was presented. He should read at nor-
mal conversational speed without excessive
pauses, and on no account was to go back over
previously read material. At the end of the pas-
sage he would be required to give a verbal precis
of its content. The subject was also provided with
a pencil and instructed to mark any words which
he could not identify or which were misspelt. It
was stressed that this should occur while he was
reading. On no account should he go back over
the text searching for errors. When the subject
had finished reading, the text was removed, and
he was immediately required to outline the con-
tent of the passage in his own words. For inclu-
sion into the analysis each subject had to fulfil
two conditions: first that he should identify cor-
rectly all words in the story other than the al-
229
tered words; secondly that he should be able to
give an adequate account of the major items of
content in the passage.
Subjects
Twenty-one subjects were included in the
analysis. They were university students from a
volunteer subject pool aged from 18 to 22. From
an original sample of 23 subjects two were ex-
cluded from the analysis for failing to give a
minimally adequate account of the narrative
content.
RESULTS
The criterion for allowing that inference
occurred in a subject's treatment of an al-
tered word was that it was uttered as if it
had not been altered and was not marked
with the pencil. In such a case the subject
was said to have failed to detect the altera-
tion. Table 1 shows the mean number of
transpositions not detected by subjects at
each word position. A Friedman analysis of
variance (position by subjects) gave x r 2
(2,20) = 1697, p < .001, showing a highly
significant position effect. Wilcoxon tests
were used to estimate T for each pair of
positions, and it was found that each posi-
tion was significantly different from any
other position (p < .001 in all cases). Most
detection failures occurred at middle posi-
tions in words, and least detection failures
occurred at beginning positions.
Table 11 presents the position data for
each altered word, and the overall pattern
for six- and seven-letter words was com-
pared using Friedman tests for each group
separately. For six-letter words x r 2 (2,14) =
7.60, p < .025, and for seven-letter words
Xr2 (2,14) = 16.93, p < .001, showing a
significant position effect for both groups.
Examination of the data reveals a closely
similar distribution of errors over positions,
with middle positions least well detected in
both groups.
DISCUSSION
The difficulty of 'proof reading' is well
known (Vernon, 1931; Corcoran, 1967),
and it is usually accomplished only by read-
230
TABLE I
Mean detection failures at each position
of transposition
Beginning Middle End
Mean 0.1 2.8 0.9
Percentage 1.2 23.4 7.5
ing slowly and paying little attention to con-
tent. In the present experiment, subjects
read at a normal speed and were instructed
to attend to context. With these instructions
no subject was able to detect all the altered
words present in the text. Before accepting,
however, that these failures of detection
were due to inference from context, two
alternatives must be discussed.
First, it may be argued that subjects can-
not spell the middles of words as confi-
dently as their beginnings or ends (Jensen,
1962), and so are less likely to perceive
middle transpositions as wrong. This argu-
ment has little to recommend it. It would,
for one thing, suggest that university stu-
dents were unable to spell the middles
of almost a quarter of a sample of high
frequency words. It would suggest, for
another, that the particular errors present
in the text are ones that subjects would be
likely to make. In fact, such transpositions
are one of the less common types of spelling
error in English. Most errors tend to have a
phonetic relation to the correct spelling
(Peters, 1963).
Secondly, it may be argued that in read-
ing aloud subjects will tend to accept an
incorrect spelling if it is phonetically similar
to the correct spelling, and that middle
transpositions are most likely to make ac-
ceptable alternatives. Examination of the
word list in Table 11 rapidly demonstrates
that, if any transposition results in phoneti-
cally similar forms, it is end transpositions
which do so (e.g. 'before' to 'befoer'), and
this would mean that end transpositions
should be the hardest to detect. This is, of
course, not the case.
If the correct account of these results is
J.A. Sloboda
 that subjects infer the presence of a word
Number of subjects (max. = 7) who failed to without full analysis of interior letters, then
detect transpositions of each word. (The letters it remains to ask why they should do this. It
exchanged in middle transpositions are italicized) could remain true, in some sense, that in-
terior letters are more difficult to perceive
Transposition
than exterior letters. For instance Estes
Word Beginning Middle End (1975) has argued that positional uncer-
tainty may account for much of the error in
6-LETTERS
letter identification tasks, and it is easy to
rather 0 1 0 understand that information from interior
indeed 0 0 0 positions may be confused more than that
people 0 2 1 from exterior positions, simply on the
be/ore 0 1 0 grounds that exterior letters are flanked by
called 0 0 0
eldest 0 1 0
fewer surrounding letters. Indeed, some
second 0 7 0 authors (Townsend, Taylor, & Brown,
sa/ely 1 1 1 1971) maintain that visual masking remains
string 0 1 0 operative even in situations where expo-
untied 0 4 2 sure time is not restricted. Even so, it re-
looked 0 0 0
mains pertinent to ask why this effect
middte 0 3 1
bundle 0 0 1 should persist in an unpaced task. If in-
apples 0 0 1 teriors of words are difficult to perceive,
banana 0 1 0 why do subjects not spend more time on
them? A possible answer is that it requires
TOTAL 1 22 7 less attentional capacity to use inference
from surrounding context as a resolution
7-LETTERS
of positional (or any other kind of percep-
country 0 1 0
bedside 0 1 0
tual) uncertainty about word interiors. It
private 0 2 0 may indeed be, as some authors have
noting 0 2 1 suggested, that word interiors are the most
sni/fed 0 0 0 redundant parts of words (Bruner &
wi/tout 0 2 0 O'Dowd, 1958; Miller & Friedman, 1957;
sneezed 0 1 0 Lefton, Spragins, & Barnes, 1973). Thus,
knowing 0 0 0
exac/ly 0 1 0
although middles of words may be difficult
laughed 1 3 0 to perceive, readers may fail to analyse
minutes 0 5 1 them completely only because their redun-
quarter 0 1 0 dancy makes this possible; i.e., in normal
looting 0 1 0 reading such a strategy still allows correct
for/une 0 2 0
word identification.
himself 0 2 0
If redundancy is a sufficient condition
TOTAL 1 24 2 for inference to occur, then we may expect
inference to occur in other reading situa-
OTHERS tions where the perceptual difficulties do
everyone 0 0 0 not resemble those encountered in prose
farming 0 1 0
whis/led 0 0 0
reading. Music reading appears to be such a
shoulder 0 5 0 skill. Although notes are read from left to
shil/ings 0 1 3 right, the perceptual difficulties arise not so
eightpence 0 4 7 much from horizontal 'masking' as from
difficulties in the vertical localization of in-
TOTAL 0 11 10
dividual notes (Sloboda, 1976a). That is to

Item position and identification by inference in prose and music reading 231
say, music is written onto a stave containing
five closely adjacent horizontal lines where
the identity of the note is determined, not
by its shape, but by its vertical position on
the stave. At brief exposure durations
single notes cannot be localized accurately
in the vertical plane. On the other hand, the
distance between two adjacent notes is large
in comparison to the distance between two
adjacent letters in normal text. This makes
it likely that perceptual interference be-
tween adjacent notes does not play an im-
portant part in music reading. This has
the further implication that perceptual
difficulty in music reading is not related to
particular positions within the musical text
but is a general difficulty related to the
identification of each note. Much music is
highly redundant in the sense that indi-
vidual notes may be inferred from sur-
rounding context. Perceptual factors alone
give no reason to suppose that there will be
any positional distribution of such infer-
ence. If, however, there were positional dif-
ferences in redundancy within musical pas-
sages, then positional distribution of in-
ference could occur. A study of musical
phrases (Sloboda, 1976b) suggests that
phrases are primary psychological units in
music reading, and Experiment 11 is con-
cerned to discover whether inference in a
music reading task is positionally distri-
buted within the phrase.
EXPERIMENT II
In order to make this experiment as
analogous to the preceding experiment as
possible, it was decided to use a 'sight-
reading' situation, in which music readers
read unfamiliar musical pieces couched in a
familiar musical idiom. Thus, although the
overall content was unfamiliar to them, in-
dividual subcomponents of the passage
would have high familiarity. In music,
there is no absolute distinction between
'correct' and 'incorrect' subcomponents;
rather there is a continuum ranging from
'highly likely' to 'highly unlikely,' and the
232
parameters of this continuum will vary
from subject to subject according to his de-
gree of familiarity with the style. In order to
make a situation comparable to the lan-
guage experiment where a spelling was
either 'correct' or 'incorrect,' it was neces-
sary to select a musical idiom which would
be highly familiar to the subjects, and to
choose passages which contained only
'highly likely' subcomponents. By introduc-
ing 'highly unlikely' transformations into
these texts, it was hoped to produce 'errors'
which, if noticed, would be unambiguously
characterized by subjects as 'errors.'
It is, of course, not possible to make a
direct analogy between the musical phrase
and the word, since, even if a musical pas-
sage contains only 'highly familiar' sub-
components, there is no reason to suppose
that these subcomponents will be as large as
a phrase. A musical phrase may well con-
tain two or more 'words.' The only way that
it was possible to guard to some extent
against this possibility was to choose fairly
short phrases which did not seem to allow
substantial subdivision, and in this the au-
thor was aided by the judgment of a practis-
ing musician not otherwise involved in the
experiment. Only passages were used
about which there was substantial agree-
ment between the two judges with respect
to the high predictability or familiarity of
the phrases.
A further weakness of the analogy con-
cerns the epistemological status of words as
compared to musical 'units.' Words are
known as such, because in addition to con-
forming to orthographic or phonological
rules, they have commonly accepted mean-
ing. The string 'beofre' has no meaning
attached to it, and a reader may therefore
come to the conclusion that it is a misspell-
ing of 'before.' It is not clear that a musical
unit has 'meaning' in this same sense such
that there would be common consent that a
particular string of notes was meaningless.
What has to stand in for meaning is a knowl-
edge of a particular idiom expressed in the
implicit assumption that Mozart, or any
J.A. Sloboda
composer concerned, 'just wouldn't write a
string of notes like that.' The process
whereby such knowledge is acquired is little
understood, and the extent of such knowl-
edge varies greatly from musician to musi-
cian. The musical 'misspellings' employed
in this experiment assumed minimal knowl-
edge of this sort in that, rather than violat-
ing the style of a particular composer, they
violated rules of harmonic and melodic
progression common to the vast bulk of
Western tonal music.
Stimulus Materials
The choice of material was dictated by the desire
to provide maximum opportunity for inference,
together with maximum attentional load. Much
music of the Baroque-Classical period shows a
high degree of regularity in its structure, and so
search for suitable material was restricted to
lesser known composers of that period. In
addition, it was decided to use keyboard music
rather than string or wind music. Keyboard
music, unlike most other kinds, requires the
performer to play several notes at once. In con-
sequence, the attentional demands are high be-
cause the performer is continuously monitor-
ing at least two music staves. Four short ex-
tracts were chosen from compositions by
B. Marcello (1686-1739) a n d J L - Dussek
(1760-1812). Each extract covered one sheet of
manuscript and had a performing duration of
about two minutes. The extracts were written
out on two staves, the lower one containing
material to be played by the left hand, and the
upper containing that to be played by the right
hand. The main musical phrases were iden-
tified, and 72 notational errors were introduced,
18 into each extract. Of the 72 errors, 36 were in
the upper stave. One third of the errors in each
stave appeared at the beginning of a phrase (first
two beats), one third appeared at the end of a
phrase (last two beats), and the remainder ap-
peared at other positions.
Errors were introduced by raising or lowering
the pitch of a note by one position on the stave,
leaving all other aspects as in the original text. In
a previous study (Sloboda, 1976a) it was shown
that, under conditions of restricted exposure,
identification errors tended to differ from the
note presented by one position on the stave,
suggesting that this would be the most difficult
type of alteration to detect in reading musical
text. The errors were chosen such that they
tended not to make plausible alternatives to the
correct note in the context of surrounding notes.
Item position and identification by inference in prose and music reading
It is to be noted that the experimenter allowed
himself the freedom of choosing whether to
raise or lower a note, and also of choosing which
note to alter. This is in contrast to the strict
controls employed in Experiment 1. There are,
however, a number of reasons why this proce-
dure seemed unavoidable. First, a large number
of available alterations are ruled out on the
grounds that they do not produce 'highly un-
likely' musical effects. Secondly, certain altera-
tions produce passages which are unplayable for
technical reasons. Finally, it seemed wise not to
define the 'middle' of a phrase too strictly, since,
as argued earlier, a phrase could possibly con-
tain two or more 'words,' so that random varia-
tion in the position of alteration would be most
likely to hit upon the middle of whatever the
effective unit was. In effect, then, the notional
freedom exercised by the experimenter con-
tained very little actual freedom.
Procedure
Each subject was tested individually, and his
performance recorded on tape. The tape re-
cordings were subsequently transcribed and
analysed for errors by the author. The subject
was instructed that he was to receive a test of his
short-term musical learning ability. He would be
presented with a number of passages to sight-
read. Each piece would then be presented a sec-
ond time for a further attempt, the measure of
interest being the degree of improvement on the
second trial. This instruction was intended to
direct the subject to the overall features of each
piece. The subject was allowed to choose his own
performing speeds, but was required to com-
mence playing within 5 seconds of being pre-
sented with an extract. The extracts were pre-
sented in the same order on both trials with a
break of a few minutes between trials. All sub-
jects were instructed to play the notes exactly as
written.
Subjects
Seven adult musicians were tested. They were all
professional keyboard players or music students
who considered themselves adequate sight-
readers. Their adequacy was confirmed by the
high level of accuracy in their performances.
RESULTS
It was initially intended to discard the re-
sults of the second trial after ensuring that
subjects had, in fact, improved their per-
formance, but the data from the second
trial showed a change in error pattern
233
 which had considerable bearing on the in- TABLE III
terpretation given to the results overall and Number of errors made in a sight reading task
so were retained. Practically all subjects re-
marked quite early on in the experiment First trial Second trial
that some of the notes seemed 'wrong,' and
Un- Un-
some asked whether there was some 'catch' Subject altered Altered altered Altered
to the experiment. To all such questions the
experimenter simply reiterated the instruc- A 56 26 30 32
tions to play exactly what was written. It was B 29 15 21 20
C 31 27 19 29
clear that the subjects had quite clear expec-
D 26 16 19 25
tancies about the musical structure which E 37 23 22 27
were violated by the existence of the in- F 33 28 15 20
serted pitch alterations. It is, therefore, sig- G 20 34 13 33
nificant that even those subjects most de- Mean 33 24 20 27
termined not to be caught out failed to Percentage 2 . 9 37.6 1.7 41.3
notice a considerable proportion of the al-
terations. position) carried out for each stave gave x r 2
The extracts contained a total of 1292 (2,6) = 11.64., p < .001, for the upper stave
notes, of which 72 were altered. For scoring and x r 2 (2,6) = 9.21, p < .01 for the lower
purposes, altered notes were treated sepa- stave. Sign tests between pairs of positions
rately. Each note played was scored as an show that each upper stave position is sig-
error if it failed to correspond in pitch to nificandy different from any other position
the appropriate written note. Rhythm er- (p < .01 in each case) such that middle
rors, which were slight, were not taken into alterations are least well detected and be-
account, and if a subject corrected himself, ginning alterations are best detected. In the
his first uncorrected performance was case of the lower stave only the end position
taken as the one for scoring. Table m shows is significantly different from each of the
the number of errors made by each subject other two positions (p < .01) such that end
on altered and unaltered notes. The pro- alterations are best detected.
portion of unaltered notes played incor- A final analysis of the errors on altered
rectly is very small (about 2%) but the error notes was performed in which the scores
rate on altered notes is high (about 40%). from the two staves were combined. A
Such errors were nearly always what the Friedman analysis of variance (subjects by
note should have been, i.e. as in the original position) gave x r 2 (2,6) = 10.50, p < .01.
unaltered text. Wilcoxon tests were carried Sign tests between pairs of positions
out between subjects' error scores on the showed that there were significantly more
two trials. For unaltered notes T = o (p < failures to detect alterations at middle posi-
.01), showing significantly fewer errors on tions than at other positions, although be-
the second trial. For altered notes T = 7, ginning and end positions were not sig-
showing no significant difference in error nificantly different.
between trials. In fact 5 out of the 7 subjects
actually showed an increase in errors on the DISCUSSION
second trial. The finding that repetition of a sight-
In analysing the effect of position of al- reading task decreases errors on unaltered
teration, the upper and lower staves were notes while showing a trend towards in-
treated separately, but errors were sum- creasing errors on altered notes is strong
med over trials. Table iv shows the total evidence that inference occurs in music
errors on altered notes for each subject. A reading. On a second attempt at the same
Friedman analysis of variance (subjects by material a reader will presumably incorpo-

234 J.A. Sloboda

TABLE IV was played incorrectly (as expected in the
Number of errors on altered notes at each context) on the second trial.
position in phrase The effect of position of an alteration
upon its detection is marked. The upper
Beginning Middle End stave shows exactly the same distribution of
Subject Upper Stave
errors obtained in the previous experi-
ment, where alterations in the middle of a
A 7 19 12 unit are detected least well. Since there is no
B 5 10 4 strong reason to suppose that visual factors
C 2 16 6
D 4 10 6
make phrase middles less easy to process,
E 7 10 9 the results suggest that sight readers use
F 5 8 7 structural constraints that allow them the
G 7 20 7 strategy of making inferences in the mid-
Mean 5.3 13.3 7.3 dles of phrases. Sloboda (1976b) has
Percentage 25 62 34 examined the eye-hand span of music
Lower Stave readers by occluding a musical text in
mid-performance, and noting how many
A 7 7 6
unplayed notes the sight reader was able to
B 5 7 4
C 12 11 9
produce at that point. The tendency was
D 8 8 5 for this span to extend to a phrase bound-
E 8 10 6 ary. Levin and Kaplan (1970) have re-
F 9 10 9 ported a similar effect in prose reading.
G 14 12 7 This is consistent with the hypothesis that
Mean 9.0 9.3 6.6
Percentage 42 43 31
the reader attends most to points of low
redundancy near phrase boundaries, and
rate information from the memory of his may not attend so closely to points of great-
first attempt. This may be memory of indi- er redundancy in the middle of phrases.
vidual notes, but more probably it is mem- Phrase structure is not so evident in the
ory of higher order structure (in the lower stave since, as is common with music
same way as initial memory for prose tends of this period, it often provides a running
not to be word for word; Bartlett, 1932; and repetitive accompanying figure (Al-
Johnson-Laird, Robins, & Velicogna, berti Bass) which supports the right-hand
1974). Such memory may, when the text is melody harmonically and rhythmically
still relatively poorly known, increase the without supplying any melodic content. It is
probability of correctly identifying notes possible that this difference accounts for
which conform to that structure (because the rather different error pattern. The bass
inference becomes more likely to produce figuration will tend to change most where
the correct response) whilst decreasing the there is most harmonic change. Usually the
probability of correctly identifying notes rate of harmonic change increases towards
which do not conform to that structure (be- the end of a phrase (the so-called 'cadential
cause inference becomes less likely to pro- sequence'), and so it may be most economi-
duce the correct response). At a later stage cal for a reader to attend to the stave most
in the learning process the reader will, of closely at this point. This is, however, only a
course, begin to memorize individual notes, tentative suggestion, and it may be that the
in particular those notes which do not con- best way to consider these results is to com-
form to expectations. Thus we may under- bine the staves and to take the overall effect
stand the apparently paradoxical finding as the most useful measure of positional
that in some cases an altered note which was differences. This measure clearly indicates
played correctly (as written) on thefirst trial that textual information from middle posi-

I tern position and identification by inference in prose and music reading 235
tions in musical phrases is less likely to de-
termine eventual responses than is infor-
mation from beginnings or ends.
It remains to ask whether the similarity of
position effects in prose and music reading
is brought about by a similarity of structure
in the two forms, or by a similarity in
strategies which readers develop to deal
with rather different structures. An argu-
ment in favour of the second alternative is
that all music readers will have learned to
read prose before, or at least concurrently
with, learning to read music. There is some
evidence that words are stored in memory
on the basis of their initial andfinalele-
ments (Brown & McNeil, 1966; Brown,
1970), and the implications of this for read-
ing may well be generalized to music. On
the other hand some authors (e.g. Winog-
rad, 1968) have argued that music and lan-
guage can be characterized by similar struc-
tures. Should this be so, then these findings
are encouraging for models of human in-
formation processing which postulate simi-
lar mechanisms to account for verbal and
non-verbal cognitive skills (e.g. Simon &
Gilmartin, 1973; Baron & Thurston, 1973).
The immediate significance of these results
is to demonstrate that inference of interior
elements of sequential units is not restric-
ted to situations where visual masking (or
any other purely perceptual phenomenon)
demands inference, and they suggest an
additional factor influencing the presence
of position effects in tachistoscopic word
recognition.
RESUME
Des lecteurs ont a lire des textes verbaux et
musicaux qui contiennent respectivement des
erreurs d'epellation et de notation. En des situa-
tions de lecture normale, on observe que les
erreurs sont moins susceptibles d'etre detectees
quand elles se presentent au milieu de mots ou
de phrases musicales, ce qui demontre que la
plus forte proportion des inferences se trouve a
cet endroit. La similitude apparente des effets
observes en lecture musicale et verbale suggere
que l'inference des elements interieurs est
236
habituellement due a des facteurs structuraux
plutot que visuels.
REFERENCES
BARON, j . , & THURSTON, i. An analysis of the word
superiority effect. Cogn. PsychoL, 1973,4, 207-228
BARTLETT, F.c. Remembering. Cambridge: University
Press, 1932
BROWN, R. Psychology and reading. In H. LEVIN and J.P.
WILLIAMS (Eds.), Basic studies on reading. New York:
Basic Books, 1970
BROWN, R., & MCNEIL, D. The 'tip of the tongue'
phenomenon./, verb. Learn, verb. Behav., 1966,5,
325-337
BRUNER, j.s., 8c O'DOWD, D. A note on informativeness
of words. Language &f Speech, 1958, 1,98-101
CORCORAN, D.W.J. Acoustic factor in proof-reading.
Nature, 1967, 814, 851-852
ESTES, W.K. The locus of inferential and perceptual
processes in letter identification. / . exp. PsychoL:
General, 1975, 104, 122—145
ESTES, W.K., 8c WOLFORD, G.L. Effect of spaces on report
from tachistoscopically presented letter strings.
Psychonom. Sci., 1971, 5*5, 77-80
JENSEN, A.R. Spelling errors and the serial position
effect./, ed. PsychoL, 1962,53, 105-iog
JOHNSON-LAIRD, P.N., ROBINS, C , & VELICOGNA, L.
Memory for words. Nature, 1974, 251, 704-705
KOLERS, P.A. Reading and talking bi-lingually. Am.J.
PsychoL, 1966,79,357-376
LEFTON, L.A., SPRAGINS, A.B., & BARNES, j . English or-
thography: relation to reading experience. Bull.
Psychonom. Soc, 1973, a, 281-282
LEVIN, H., 8c KAPLAN, E.A. Grammatical structure and
reading. In H. LEVIN and J.P. WILLIAMS (Eds.), Basic
studies on reading. New York: Basic Books, 1970
MARCHBANKS, G., & LEVIN, H. Cues by which children
recognise words./, ed. PsychoL, 1965,56, 57-61
MILLER, G.A., 8c FRIEDMAN, E.A. The reconstruction of
mutilated English text. Information Control, 1957,1,
38-55
MORTON, j . The effects of context on the visual dura-
tion threshold for words. Brit.J. PsychoL, 1964, 55,
165-180
PETERS, M.L. The influence of reading methods on
spelling./, ed. PsychoL, 1963,54, 47-53
PILLSBURY, W.B. A study in apperception. Am.J.
PsychoL, 1897,8, 315-393
SHAW, p. Processing of tachistoscopic displays with con-
trolled order of characters and spaces. Percept.
Psychophys., 1969,6, 257-266
SIMON, H.A. 8c GILMARTIN, K. A simulation of memory
for chess positions. Cogn. PsychoL, 1973,5, 29-46
SLOBODA, J.A. Visual perception of musical notation:
Registering pitch symbols in memory. Quart. J. exp.
PsychoL, 1976, s8, 1-16 (a)
SLOBODA, J.A. Phrase units as determinants of visual
J.A. Sloboda
 processing in music reading. Brit.J. Psychol., 1976.
In press, (b)
THOMPSON, M.C., & MASSARO, D.w. Visual information
and redundancy in reading.y. exp. Psychol., 1973,98,
49-54
TOWNSEND, J.T., TAYLOR, S.G., BROWN, D.R. Lateral
masking for letters with unlimited viewing time.
Percept. Psychophys., 1971,10, 375-378
VERNON, M.D. Characteristics of proof-reading. Brit.J.
Psychol., 1931, s i , 368
Item position and identification by inference in prose and music reading
WEBER, R. First Graders' use of grammatical context in
reading. In H. LEVIN and J.P. WILLIAMS (Eds.), Basic
studies on reading. New York: Basic Books, 1970
WINOGRAD, T. Linguistics and the computer analysis of
tonal harmony.y. Music Theory, 1968,1*, 2-49
WOODWORTH, R.s. Experimental Psychology. New York:
Holt, 1938
(First received 9 February 1976)
(Date accepted 29 September 1976)
237