Sing that tune: Infants’ perception of melody and lyrics and the facilitation of phonetic recognition in songs

Abstract

To better understand how infants process complex auditory input, this study investigated whether 11-month-old infants perceive the pitch (melodic) or the phonetic (lyric) components within songs as more salient, and whether melody facilitates phonetic recognition. Using a preferential looking paradigm, uni-dimensional and multi-dimensional songs were tested; either the pitch or syllable order of the stimuli varied. As a group, infants detected a change in pitch order in a 4-note sequence when the syllables were redundant (Experiment 1), but did not detect the identical pitch change with variegated syllables (Experiment 2). Infants were better able to detect a change in syllable order in a sung sequence (Experiment 2) than the identical syllable change in a spoken sequence (Experiment 1). These results suggest that by 11 months, infants cannot "ignore" phonetic information in the context of perceptually salient pitch variation. Moreover, the increased phonetic recognition in song contexts mirrors findings that demonstrate advantages of infantdirected speech. Findings are discussed in terms of how stimulus complexity interacts with the perception of sung speech in infancy.

Mode of Presentation Affects Infants’ Preferential Attention to Singing and Speech

“…Lebedeva and Kuhl (2010) found that 11-month-olds encoded changes in melodic information when the melody was sung with a repeating syllable but failed to encode the changes when the melody was sung with changing syllables. They suggested that the amount of information of the stimulus with variegated syllables contributed to infants' decrease in melodic discrimination.…”

Infants’ sensitivity to rhyme in songs

“…First, our rhyming stimuli were embedded in prototypical children's song melodies. Previous research has shown that language processing in infants as well as adults benefits from the tight coupling of linguistic and musical information in songs (Bebout & Belke, 2017;Lebedeva & Kuhl, 2010;Thiessen & Saffran, 2009). Second, rhymes were placed at phrase boundaries.…”

“…Taken together, a simpler approach using a smaller number of songs that consist of shorter melodic phrases and carry natural native language lyrics could be a promising road for future investigations. Other studies using the Headturn Preference Procedure have successfully shown that infants process songs, using song stimuli that have shorter phrases, and with melodies and lyrics that are repeated in several trials of the experiment (Corbeil, Trehub, & Peretz, 2013;Lebedeva & Kuhl, 2010;Thiessen & Saffran, 2009). …”

“Mom called me!” Behavioral and prefrontal responses of infants to self-names spoken by their mothers

“…Thus, each condition was repeated twice for each infant. This procedure can reliably evaluate the degree to which infants recognize familiar sounds (e.g., Lebedeva and Kuhl, 2010). The presentation order of the four conditions was counterbalanced across participants.…”