Lateral asymmetries in infant melody perception.

Balaban, Marie T.; Anderson, Linda M.; Wisniewski, Amy B.

doi:10.1037/0012-1649.34.1.39

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…82,83 Moreover, eight-month-old infants exhibit a left-ear superiority for contour processing and a right-ear superiority for intervalic processing. 84 Such laterality effects parallel those reported for adults. 85,86…”

Section: Hemispheric Specializationsupporting

confidence: 63%

Musical Predispositions in Infancy

Trehub

2001

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

252

175

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Some scholars consider music to exemplify the classic criteria for a complex human adaptation, including universality, orderly development, and special-purpose cortical processes. The present account focuses on processing predispositions for music. The early appearance of receptive musical skills, well before they have obvious utility, is consistent with their proposed status as predispositions. Infants' processing of musical or music-like patterns is much like that of adults. In the early months of life, infants engage in relational processing of pitch and temporal patterns. They recognize a melody when its pitch level is shifted upward or downward, provided the relations between tones are preserved. They also recognize a tone sequence when the tempo is altered so long as the relative durations remain unchanged. Melodic contour seems to be the most salient feature of melodies for infant listeners. However, infants can detect interval changes when the component tones are related by small-integer frequency ratios. They also show enhanced processing for scales with unequal steps and for metric rhythms. Mothers sing regularly to infants, doing so in a distinctive manner marked by high pitch, slow tempo, and emotional expressiveness. The pitch and tempo of mothers' songs are unusually stable over extended periods. Infant listeners prefer the maternal singing style to the usual style of singing, and they are more attentive to maternal singing than to maternal speech. Maternal singing also has a moderating effect on infant arousal. The implications of these findings for the origins of music are discussed. MUSICAL PREDISPOSITIONS IN INFANCYThe notion of musical predispositions implies a biological basis for music. For contributors to a forum on the biological foundations of music, consideration of predispositions is hardly surprising. It is worth remembering, however, that the larger scientific community remains skeptical about links between music and biology. Steven Pinker, who popularized the notion of a language instinct, 1 dismisses music as "cultural cheesecake"-a confection that tickles our sensitive spots. "As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless. It shows no signs of design for attaining a goal such as long life, grandchildren, or accurate perception and prediction of the world. Compared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical

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Section: Hemispheric Specializationsupporting

confidence: 63%

Musical Predispositions in Infancy

Trehub

2001

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

252

175

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Earlier studies show autonomy between language and music processing. Newborn infants’ hemispheric dominances differ between language (left hemisphere, Witelson and Pallie 1973 ) and music (right hemisphere, Balaban et al 1998 ). Individuals with a disorder in one domain may have the other domain largely intact (Ullman et al 1997 ; Hébert et al 2003 ; Peretz et al 2003 ; Peretz and Coltheart 2003 ; Racette et al 2006 ; Wilson et al 2006 ; Schlaug et al 2008 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhanced music sensitivity in 9-month-old bilingual infants

Liu

Kager

2016

Cogn Process

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This study explores the influence of bilingualism on the cognitive processing of language and music. Specifically, we investigate how infants learning a non-tone language perceive linguistic and musical pitch and how bilingualism affects cross-domain pitch perception. Dutch monolingual and bilingual infants of 8–9 months participated in the study. All infants had Dutch as one of the first languages. The other first languages, varying among bilingual families, were not tone or pitch accent languages. In two experiments, infants were tested on the discrimination of a lexical (N = 42) or a violin (N = 48) pitch contrast via a visual habituation paradigm. The two contrasts shared identical pitch contours but differed in timbre. Non-tone language learning infants did not discriminate the lexical contrast regardless of their ambient language environment. When perceiving the violin contrast, bilingual but not monolingual infants demonstrated robust discrimination. We attribute bilingual infants’ heightened sensitivity in the musical domain to the enhanced acoustic sensitivity stemming from a bilingual environment. The distinct perceptual patterns between language and music and the influence of acoustic salience on perception suggest processing diversion and association in the first year of life. Results indicate that the perception of music may entail both shared neural network with language processing, and unique neural network that is distinct from other cognitive functions.

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“…Such integration may occur very early in development. Balaban et al (1998) have shown that the same left-right brain asymmetry in the processing of interval and contour cues in melodies is already present in infancy. In the adult, extraction of both contour and intervals does not require attention either, as electrical brain responses suggest (Tervaniemi 2003, Trainor et al 2002.…”

Section: Pitch Relationsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Brain Organization for Music Processing

Peretz

Zatorre

2005

Annu. Rev. Psychol.

648

427

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Research on how the brain processes music is emerging as a rich and stimulating area of investigation of perception, memory, emotion, and performance. Results emanating from both lesion studies and neuroimaging techniques are reviewed and integrated for each of these musical functions. We focus our attention on the common core of musical abilities shared by musicians and nonmusicians alike. Hence, the effect of musical training on brain plasticity is examined in a separate section, after a review of the available data regarding music playing and reading skills that are typically cultivated by musicians. Finally, we address a currently debated issue regarding the putative existence of music-specific neural networks. Unfortunately, due to scarcity of research on the macrostructure of music organization and on cultural differences, the musical material under focus is at the level of the musical phrase, as typically used in Western popular music.

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Lateral asymmetries in infant melody perception.

Cited by 16 publications

References 67 publications

Musical Predispositions in Infancy

Musical Predispositions in Infancy

Enhanced music sensitivity in 9-month-old bilingual infants

Brain Organization for Music Processing

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