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

Hahn, Laura E.; Benders, Titia; Snijders, Tineke M.; Fikkert, Paula

doi:10.1111/infa.12357

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 75 publications

(140 reference statements)

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“…In language, listeners extract semantic meaning from words (e.g., Waxman et al, 2013) and rely on knowledge of syntactic structure to ascertain who is doing what to whom (e.g., Snedeker & Trueswell, 2004). Even when music has lyrics, attention is likely weighted toward melodic elements more than words (Godmundsdottir & Trehub, 2017;Jakubowski et al, 2017;Elmer, 2011; but see Hahn et al, 2020;Snijders et al, 2020). Although research has examined how children develop skills within language (e.g., Kidd et al, 2018;Saffran, 2020) and music (Trainor & Hannon, 2013), little is known about whether children readily distinguish between or activate distinct processes for each domain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental changes in the categorization of speech and song

Nederlanden

Xin

Sequeira

et al. 2022

Developmental Science

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Music and language are two fundamental forms of human communication. Many studies examine the development of music‐ and language‐specific knowledge, but few studies compare how listeners know they are listening to music or language. Although we readily differentiate these domains, how we distinguish music and language—and especially speech and song— is not obvious. In two studies, we asked how listeners categorize speech and song. Study 1 used online survey data to illustrate that 4‐ to 17‐year‐olds and adults have verbalizable distinctions for speech and song. At all ages, listeners described speech and song differences based on acoustic features, but compared with older children, 4‐ to 7‐year‐olds more often used volume to describe differences, suggesting that they are still learning to identify the features most useful for differentiating speech from song. Study 2 used a perceptual categorization task to demonstrate that 4–8‐year‐olds and adults readily categorize speech and song, but this ability improves with age especially for identifying song. Despite generally rating song as more speech‐like, 4‐ and 6‐year‐olds rated ambiguous speech–song stimuli as more song‐like than 8‐year‐olds and adults. Four acoustic features predicted song ratings: F0 instability, utterance duration, harmonicity, and spectral flux. However, 4‐ and 6‐year‐olds’ song ratings were better predicted by F0 instability than by harmonicity and utterance duration. These studies characterize how children develop conceptual and perceptual understandings of speech and song and suggest that children under age 8 are still learning what features are important for categorizing utterances as speech or song.Research Highlights Children and adults conceptually and perceptually categorize speech and song from age 4. Listeners use F0 instability, harmonicity, spectral flux, and utterance duration to determine whether vocal stimuli sound like song. Acoustic cue weighting changes with age, becoming adult‐like at age 8 for perceptual categorization and at age 12 for conceptual differentiation. Young children are still learning to categorize speech and song, which leaves open the possibility that music‐ and language‐specific skills are not so domain‐specific.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental changes in the categorization of speech and song

Nederlanden

Xin

Sequeira

et al. 2022

Developmental Science

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“…melodic features. According to recent studies, melodic feature recognition is present as early as 6 months of age (Hahn et al 2020;. Recent genetic data also support the hypothesis.…”

Section: Music As Credible Signal Of Parental Attentionmentioning

confidence: 75%

Evolutionary origins of music. Classical and recent hypotheses

Kalinowski

Kozłowska

Malesza³

et al. 2021

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The aim of this paper is to review recent hypotheses on the evolutionary origins of music in Homo sapiens, taking into account the most influential traditional hypotheses. To date, theories derived from evolution have focused primarily on the importance that music carries in solving detailed adaptive problems. The three most influential theoretical concepts have described the evolution of human music in terms of 1) sexual selection, 2) the formation of social bonds, or treated it 3) as a byproduct. According to recent proposals, traditional hypotheses are flawed or insufficient in fully explaining the complexity of music in Homo sapiens. This paper will critically discuss three traditional hypotheses of music evolution (music as an effect of sexual selection, a mechanism of social bonding, and a byproduct), as well as and two recent concepts of music evolution - music as a credible signal and Music and Social Bonding (MSB) hypothesis.

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