Infants’ sensitivity to rhyme in songs

Six‐month‐old infants recognize phrases in song and speech

“…The present results significantly extend previous research on infants' musical grouping abilities by using ecologically valid musical stimuli and by requiring infants to group native song melodies into perceptual chunks while the song unfolds Krumhansl 1990 andNazzi et al, 2000;Hawthorne & Gerken, 2013). This study also extends our knowledge on infants' recognition of phonological units in song lyrics from syllables (François et al, 2017;Lebedeva & Kuhl, 2010;Suppanen et al, 2019;Thiessen & Saffran, 2009), rhymes (Hahn et al, 2018), and single words (Snijders et al, 2020) to larger prosodic units, namely phrases. The potential functional relevance of these findings will be discussed below.…”

“…However, other descriptions of infants' linguistic input have been broadened to include ID song (Bergelson, Amatuni, Dailey, Koorathota, & Tor, 2019;Soderstrom & Wittebolle, 2013). The present data contribute to the mounting evidence that songs can indeed be a source for infants' implicit linguistic learning (François et al, 2017;Hahn et al, 2018;Lebedeva & Kuhl, 2010;Snijders et al, 2020;Suppanen et al, 2019;Thiessen & Saffran, 2009). Consequently, ID song should be included in descriptions of the linguistically relevant input that infants receive.…”

“…We will use the paradigm described above that has successfully revealed infants' phrase segmentation of ID speech (for Dutch: Johnson & Seidl, 2008; the original study for English: Nazzi et al, 2000) with a new sample of Dutch 6-month-olds and a new version of the Dutch stimuli and extend the paradigm to ID song, using natural song material that matches the ID speech stimuli in content and syntactic structure. Our approach significantly extends previous work in two ways: First, infants' processing of song lyrics has so far been limited to smaller phonological and lexical building blocks (François et al, 2017;Hahn et al, 2018;Lebedeva & Kuhl, 2010;Snijders et al, 2020;Suppanen et al, 2019;Thiessen & Saffran, 2009). We will extend the scope of this research to phrases, cognitive units which are relevant not only for the perception of song structure but also for lexical and syntactic development in infants' native language.…”

“…It thus remains unclear whether infants chunk native songs into meaningful units and recognize subcomponents of the songs, despite these being the type of musical stimulus infants are exposed to on a daily basis. Recent evidence from Dutch infants (Hahn et al, 2018) also only indirectly supports the notion of song structure being accessible: 9-month-olds differentiated rhyming (and thus more natural) songs from non-rhyming (and thus less natural) songs, but the study did not test whether this differentiation has implications for the processing of the linguistic content. In the current study, we will provide infants only with natural native child songs and will explicitly test their ability to recognize familiarized song phrases.…”

“…Yet, songs often contain language in the song lyrics and thereby entail the possibility of language learning for the infant listener. Previous research provides evidence that infants are sensitive to small phonological units like syllables and words in song lyrics: For example, already before their first birthday infants recognize changes in the syllable order in songs (François et al, 2017;Lebedeva & Kuhl, 2010;Suppanen, Huotilainen, & Ylinen, 2019;Thiessen & Saffran, 2009), differentiate between rhyming and non-rhyming songs (Hahn, Benders, Snijders, & Fikkert, 2018), and learn novel words recurring in the song lyrics (Snijders, Benders, & Fikkert, 2020).…”