We examined the relative stability of pitch, tempo, and rhythm in maternal speech and singing to prelinguistic infants. Mothers were recorded speaking and singing to their infants on two occasions separated by 1 week or more. The pitch level and tempo of identical utterances were highly variable across the 1-week period, but these features were virtually unchanged in song repetitions. Rhythmic patterning was largely maintained in speech, as in song. Mothers' accurate reproduction of their sung performances can be considered a form of absolute pitch and absolute tempo.

This study investigated the effects of age, hearing loss, and cochlear implantation on mothers' speech to infants and children. We recorded normal-hearing (NH) mothers speaking to their children as they typically would do at home and speaking to an adult experimenter. Nine infants (10-37 months) were hearing-impaired and had used a cochlear implant (CI) for 3 to 18 months. Eighteen NH infants and children were matched either by chronological age (10-37 months) or hearing experience (3-18 months) to the CI children. Prosodic characteristics such as fundamental frequency, utterance duration, and pause duration were measured across utterances in the speech samples. The results revealed that mothers use a typical infant-directed speech style when speaking to hearing-impaired children with CIS. The results also suggested that NH mothers speak with more similar vocal styles to NH children and hearing-impaired children with CIS when matched by hearing experience rather than chronological age. Thus, mothers are sensitive to hearing experience and linguistic abilities of their NH children as well as hearing-impaired children with CIS.

The results suggest that lipreading skills and AV speech perception reflect a common source of variance associated with the development of phonological processing skills that is shared among a wide range of speech and language outcome measures.

The results suggest that acoustic cues correlated with clause boundaries are available in maternal speech to HI infants. Their exaggeration relative to adult-directed speech suggests that mothers' use of infant-directed speech is a natural behavior regardless of infant hearing status. Finally, mothers modify speech prosody according to their children's age and hearing experience.

The present study investigated a possible link between musical training and immediate memory span by testing experienced musicians and three groups of musically inexperienced subjects (gymnasts, Psychology 101 students, and video game players) on sequence memory and word familiarity tasks. By including skilled gymnasts who began studying their craft by age six, video game players, and Psychology 101 students as comparison groups, we attempted to control for some of the ways skilled musicians may differ from participants drawn from the general population in terms of gross motor skills and intensive experience in a highly skilled domain from an early age. We found that musicians displayed longer immediate memory spans than the comparison groups on auditory presentation conditions of the sequence reproductive span task. No differences were observed between the four groups on the visual conditions of the sequence memory task. These results provide additional converging support to recent findings showing that early musical experience and activity-dependent learning may selectively affect verbal rehearsal processes and the allocation of attention in sequence memory tasks. KEYWORDS: Skilled musicians, memory span, sequence learningMUSIC practice involves the development of a vast array of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills, including the assembly and memorization of long sequences of motor commands, extremely precise motor timing, fine pitch discrimination, and memorization of hours of auditory information. This experience differs in several significant ways from the training that a typical elementary school student receives. Nevertheless, the question of whether the development of these skills may have consequences outside the musical sphere has not been widely addressed. Recently, however, several researchers have argued that musical training and experience facilitate the development of verbal skills, especially verbal memory (Chan, Ho, & Cheung, 1998;Ho, Cheung, & Chan, 2003; Jakobson, Cuddy, & Kilgour, 2003). In the present study, we attempted to determine whether musicians would show larger verbal memory spans even when compared to gymnasts, a group of people who also, at a young age, took part in a highly structured activity involving repeated practice of certain motor movements over a long period of time. In addition, we tested students who played video games daily, a group that practices daily a skill involving the control of fine finger movements and focused attention.Research has shown that early experience with music can have selective effects on brain development that are strong enough to be detectable in the physical brain structure. In 1995, for example, Schlaug, Jancke, Huang, and Steinmetz, using MRI, found that a group of musicians with perfect pitch had a greater disparity between the left and right planum temporale (PT), an area of the brain that is involved in music perception, as compared to nonmusicians and musicians with relative pitch. The authors speculated that this increase i...

We explored 9-month-old infants perception of auditory temporal sequences in a series of three experiments. In Experiment 1, we presented some infants with tone sequences that were expected to induce a strongly metric framework and others with a sequence that was expected to induce a weakly metric framework or no such framework. Infants detected a change in the context of the former sequences but not in the latter sequence. In Experiment 2, infants listened to a tone sequence with temporal cues to duple or triple meter. Infants detected a change in the pattern with duple meter but not in the pattern with triple meter. In Experiment 3, infants listened to a tone sequence with harmonic cues to duple or triple meter. As in Experiment 2, infants detected a change in the context of the duple meter pattern but not in the context of triple meter. These findings are consistent with processing predispositions for auditory temporal sequences that induce a metric framework, particularly those in duple meter.

This study investigated effects of profound hearing loss on mother-infant interactions before and after cochlear implantation with a focus on maternal synchrony, complexity, and directiveness. Participants included two groups of mother-infant dyads: 9 dyads of mothers and infants with normal hearing; and 9 dyads of hearing mothers and infants with profound hearing loss. Dyads were observed at two time points: Time 1, scheduled to occur before cochlear implantation for infants with profound hearing loss (mean age = 13.6 months); and Time 2 (mean age = 23.3 months), scheduled to occur approximately six months after cochlear implantation. Hearing infants were age-matched to infants with hearing loss at both time points. Dependent variables included the proportion of maternal utterances that overlapped infant vocalizations, maternal mean length of utterance, infant word use, and combined maternal directives and prohibitions. Results showed mothers’ utterances overlapped the vocalizations of infants with hearing loss more often before cochlear implantation than after, mothers used less complex utterances with infants with cochlear implants compared to hearing peers (Time 2), and mothers of infants with profound hearing loss used frequent directives and prohibitions both before and after cochlear implantation. Together, mothers and infants adapted relatively quickly to infants’ access to cochlear implants, showing improved interactional synchrony, increased infant word use, and levels of maternal language complexity compatible with infants’ word use, all within seven months of cochlear implant activation.

Objectives The purpose of the current study was to examine the relation between speech intelligibility and prosody production in children who use cochlear implants. Methods The Beginner's Intelligibility Test (BIT) and Prosodic Utterance Production (PUP) task were administered to 15 children who use cochlear implants and 10 children with normal hearing. Adult listeners with normal hearing judged the intelligibility of the words in the BIT sentences, identified the PUP sentences as one of four grammatical or emotional moods (i.e., declarative, interrogative, happy, or sad), and rated the PUP sentences according to how well they thought the child conveyed the designated mood. Results Percent correct scores were higher for intelligibility than for prosody and higher for children with normal hearing than for children with cochlear implants. Declarative sentences were most readily identified and received the highest ratings by adult listeners; interrogative sentences were least readily identified and received the lowest ratings. Correlations between intelligibility and all mood identification and rating scores except declarative were not significant. Discussion The findings suggest that the development of speech intelligibility progresses ahead of prosody in both children with cochlear implants and children with normal hearing; however, children with normal hearing still perform better than children with cochlear implants on measures of intelligibility and prosody even after accounting for hearing age. Problems with interrogative intonation may be related to more general restrictions on rising intonation, and the correlation results indicate that intelligibility and sentence intonation may be relatively dissociated at these ages.