Given that music is a temporal activity, the perception and recognition of music elicit strong comparisons with spoken-word recognition. The difference between the two however is that spoken-word recognition has been an active area of study since the late 70s with highly influential psychological models published by scientists such as McClelland, and Marslen-Wilson, while music as a separate field of psychological study is just about gaining ground.
I find Marslen-Wilson's initial and revised versions of the cohort model appealing because of their explicit way of separating bottom-up sensory information from top-down context related effects, and providing specific rules for constraining the influence of context during recognition. Spoken-word recognition has several examples of context influencing recognition, such as the phoneme restoration effect. Intuitively, recognizing melodies follows a similar set of functional processes as speech. I know based on anecdotal experience that partial melodies are enough to enable mentally filling in and humming the rest of the melody. However, one of the problems I have faced is that of finding examples in melody recognition suggesting contextual effects consistent with the phoneme restoration effect in speech. On a positive note, experimental evidence based on the gated presentation of melodies (Dalla Bella et al.) does suggest that the recognition of melodies involves combination of bottom-up pitch-related information with top-down context.
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