Assessing Music Perception in Young Children: Evidence for and Psychometric Features of the M-Factor

Abstract

Given the relationship between language acquisition and music processing, musical perception (MP) skills have been proposed as a tool for early diagnosis of speech and language difficulties; therefore, a psychometric instrument is needed to assess music perception in children under 10 years of age, a crucial period in neurodevelopment. We created a set of 80 musical stimuli encompassing seven domains of music perception to inform perception of tonal, atonal, and modal stimuli, in a random sample of 1006 children, 6–13 years of age, equally distributed from first to fifth grades, from 14 schools (38% private schools) in So Paulo State. The underlying model was tested using confirmatory factor analysis. A model encompassing seven orthogonal specific domains (contour, loudness, scale, timbre, duration, pitch, and meter) and one general music perception factor, the “m-factor,” showed excellent fit indices. The m-factor, previously hypothesized in the literature but never formally tested, explains 93% of the reliable variance in measurement, while only 3.9% of the reliable variance could be attributed to the multidimensionality caused by the specific domains. The 80 items showed no differential item functioning based on sex, age, or enrolment in public vs. private school, demonstrating the important psychometric feature of invariance. Like Charles Spearman's g-factor of intelligence, the m-factor is robust and reliable. It provides a convenient measure of auditory stimulus apprehension that does not rely on verbal information, offering a new opportunity to probe biological and psychological relationships with music perception phenomena and the etiologies of speech and language disorders.

Rhythm and Melody Tasks for School-Aged Children With and Without Musical Training: Age-Equivalent Scores and Reliability

“…Despite this overall difference, scores did not increase consistently between age groups, especially for the c-MDT. This is similar to a recent large study which found that music perception ability did not increase as a function of age in Brazilian children (Barros et al, 2017 ). Taken together, this suggests a need to consider non-linear growth trajectories in childhood, such as the monotonic function which has been used to describe the development of musical expertise in adults (Ericsson et al, 1993 ).…”

“…Although scores are reported for children with up to 2 years of musical training, the test was designed to identify amusia (an auditory-processing deficit), and as such may not be sensitive enough to detect differences in ability between children with and without training, or changes with age. Most recently, researchers developed a battery of tests of music perception, standardized on over 1,000 Brazilian schoolchildren aged 7–13 (Barros et al, 2017 ). Test scores showed no correlations with age, indicating that the task may not be useful in a developmental context.…”

Inherent auditory skills rather than formal music training shape the neural encoding of speech

“…Current conceptions of musicality define it as an innate, natural, and spontaneous development of widely shared traits, constrained by our cognitive abilities and biology, that underlie the capacity for music (27). While being "musical" no doubt encompasses more than simple hearing or perceptual abilities (e.g., instrumental production creativity), for this investigation we focus on the receptive aspects of musicality (i.e., auditory perceptual skills), following the long tradition of assessing formal music abilities through strictly perceptual measures (28)(29)(30)(31)(32). Among the normal…”

Multidimensional measurement of exposure to music in childhood: Beyond the musician/non-musician dichotomy

“…This study's sample came from a wider project designed to assess and validate a battery of music perception (MP) skills among children and young people (Barros et al, 2017). Because the battery consists of 80 items evaluating seven compositional features (contour, timbre, meter, pitch, scale, duration, and loudness), in order to adequately estimate the parameters of the music perception items we considered at least 10 participants per observed indicator variable (i.e., the 80 items) as a rule of thumb for an adequate lower-bound sample size calculation (Nunnally, 1967), resulting in at least 800 children.…”