Music listening and the priming paradigm: Then and now.

This perspective article highlights a few landmark music priming studies published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance over the past 4 decades. Together, these studies explore the potential mechanisms responsible for melodic and harmonic priming effects (sensory vs. cognitive), the hierarchical depth of the music processor (facilitation vs. inhibition), and the type of priming effects obtained (semantic vs. discourse). I then argue that the priming paradigm still has the potential to address some of the field's most longstanding questions, particularly as pertains to musical traditions and/or participant populations from beyond the west. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).