Hannon

Faculty

Erin E. Hannon, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Program:

Experimental

Lab:

http://faculty.unlv.edu/ehannon/

Email:

erin.hannon@unlv.edu

Phone:

(702) 895-4687

Accepting Gratuate Students 2008-2009: YES

Research Interests

Erin Hannon's research aims to understand the development of culture-specific and domain-specific knowledge of complex sound structures such as music and speech. Using cross-cultural comparisons, she examines how mechanisms underlying perception of music arise and change from infancy through adulthood as a result of experience in one's culture and cognitive developmental processes that are independent of culture. In current work she investigates (1) How perception of musical rhythm and meter is constrained during infancy and reorganized as a result of everyday exposure to music, (2) Whether or not there are critical period-like effects in acquisition of musical knowledge, (3) The development of intermodal perception in a musical context (e. g., perception of dancing and the development of synchronized movement to music), (4) Parallels between music and speech in rhythm perception and rule-learning, and (5) The role of music and singing in caretaking contexts.

Dr. Hannon earned her 2005 Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Cornell University.

Selected Publications

Hannon, E. E. & Trainor, L. J. (in press). Music acquisition: Effects of enculturation and formal training on development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Trehub, S. E. & Hannon, E. E. (in press). Conventional rhythms enhance infants' and adults' perception of musical patterns. Cortex.

Snyder, J. S., Hannon, E. E., Large, E. W., & Christiansen, M. H. (2006). Synchronization and continuation tapping to complex meters. Music Perception, 24, 135-146.

Trehub, S. E., & Hannon, E. E. (2006). Infant music perception: Domain-general or domain-specific mechanisms? Cognition, 100, 73-99.

Hannon, E. E., & Johnson, S. P (2005). Infants use meter to categorize rhythms and melodies: Implications for musical structure learning. Cognitive Psychology, 50, 354-377.

Hannon, E. E., & Trehub, S. E. (2005). Metrical categories in infancy and adulthood. Psychological Science, 16, 48-55.

Hannon, E. E., & Trehub, S. E. (2005). Tuning in to musical rhythms: Infants learn more readily than adults. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 102, 12639-12643.

Hannon, E. E., Snyder, J. S., Eerola, T., & Krumhansl, C. L. (2004). The role of melodic and temporal cues in perceiving musical meter. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30, 956-974.