In class, I played four songs to demonstrate that degraded contextual cues in music lyrics make language perception difficult (e.g., even when I correctly perceive the words in some Taylor Swift songs, I have no idea what she means) Why is this? 1. Experience/knowledge based top-down processing is disrupted. 2. The phonemic restoration effect overrides the impoverished contextual cues. 3. Bottom-up processes can no longer capitalize on hierarchical language structure. 4. Word-frequency affects the ease with which we perceive high and low frequency words.
