The preferences of 2- and 4-month-old infants for consonant versus dissonant two-tone intervals was tested by using a looking-time preference procedure. Infants of both ages preferred to listen to consonant over dissonant intervals and found it difficult to recover interest after a sequence of dissonant trials. Thus, sensitivity to consonance and dissonance is found before knowledge of scale structure and may be based on the innate structure of the inner ear and the firing characteristics of the auditory nerve. It is likely that consonance perception provides a bootstrap into the task of learning the pitch structure of the musical system to which the infant is exposed.
We show that infants' long-term memory representations for melodies are not just reduced to the structural features of relative pitches and durations, but contain surface or performance tempo- and timbre-specific information. Using a head turn preference procedure, we found that after a one week exposure to an old English folk song, infants preferred to listen to a novel folk song, indicating that they remembered the familiarized melody. However, if the tempo (25% faster or slower) or instrument timbre (harp vs. piano) of the familiarized melody was changed at test, infants showed no preference, indicating that they remembered the specific tempo and timbre of the melodies. The results are consistent with an exemplar-based model of memory in infancy rather than one in which structural features are extracted and performance features forgotten.
In their everyday communication, parents do not only speak but also sing with their infants. However, it remains unclear whether infants' can discriminate speech from song or prefer one over the other. The present study examined the ability of 6- to 10-month-old infants (N = 66) from English-speaking households in London, Ontario, Canada to discriminate between auditory stimuli of native Russian-speaking and native English-speaking mothers speaking or singing to their infants. Infants listened significantly longer to the sung stimuli compared to the spoken stimuli. This is the first study to demonstrate that, even in the absence of other multimodal cues, infant listeners are able to discriminate between sung and spoken stimuli, and furthermore, prefer to listen to sung stimuli over spoken stimuli.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.