A fundamental insight of Leonard Meyer’s approach to melody perception is his notion of reversal. Defined as a marked deflection in an ongoing pattern, reversal was a syntactic necessity for Meyer, without which ensuing resting points would feel incomplete (Meyer, 1980). In this exploratory study, we frame Meyer’s theory as an empirical question: do listeners judge musical phrases with marked reversals to be more complete than those without? In a forced-choice paradigm, music students listened to pairs of synthesized phrases with matched beginnings and endings but different kinds of reversal in their continuations, selecting which phrase felt more complete. A conjoint analysis modeling selection behavior as a function of reversal type (pitch, rhythm, and both pitch and rhythm) compared to the baseline case of no reversal revealed a significant preference for reversal melodies, F(3,2192)=6.05,p<.01. Average marginal component effects demonstrated that phrases with pitch reversals, as well as phrases with both pitch and rhythm reversals, significantly increased likelihood of selection relative to no reversal (p<.05 and p<.01, respectively). The effect of solely rhythm reversal did not reach, but approached, significance. These preliminary results are consistent with Meyer’s insight that melodic reversals result in feelings of phrase-ending completeness, and future directions are considered.