A subject an readily distinguish the phonemes of his own tongue, but not those of another. He can distinguish dialects of his own language, but not those of a foreign tongue. He can understand his native language in a noisy place better than he can understand a foreign language even though he is expert in it. Conventional elements and structures in music are undoubtably over-learned. Performance with unfamiliar material is much poorer.
Some psychological stimuli have the same pattern of similarity for all people.
Color is one. The psychological distance between stimuli such as colors can be obtained by computer analysis of data expressing either the confusions that subjects make among pairs of stimuli or the numbers that they assign to the pairs to express their judgments of similarity. This kind of analysis is call multidimensional scaling . Psychological distance is dependent on, but not proportional to, physical parameters. Unhappily, multidimensional scaling is just beginning to be applied in the field of music.