<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><blockquote type="cite"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">I'll just report that every psychologist, linguist, and evolutionary biologist I've talked to about this issue has told me that they find this suggestion implausible.</div> </blockquote><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">OK, Dmitri. If you base your arguments on consulting your linguist and biologist acquaintances—rather than on considering what actually takes place in music, or considering what might make music different from language in this respect—there may indeed not be sufficient methodological common ground for fruitful discussion.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I didn't mean to offend; the question is whether it is plausible that humans have a much greater capacity to perceive recursion in the musical domain than in the linguistic domain. This really is a scientific question -- getting input from professional scientists (who study things like the limits of recursive perception in language) strikes me as a responsible thing to do. </div><div><br></div><div>DT</div><div><br></div></div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div>Dmitri Tymoczko</div><div>Associate<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Professor of Music</div><div>310 Woolworth Center</div><div>Princeton, NJ 08544-1007</div><div>(609) 258-4255 (ph), (609) 258-6793 (fax)</div><div><a href="http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri">http://music.princeton.edu/~dmitri</a></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></body></html>