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Musical Enculturation

Even before they can speak a word of their native language, babies brains have already become tuned to their native environment in response to the faces they see or the sounds they hear in interactions with caregivers, family, and friends. For example, young babies (less than 6 months) can distinguish speech sounds (such as /ra/ vs. /la/) in languages they have never heard, but they lose this ability by 12 months of age as they become sensitive to the ways in which sounds do or do not delineate meaning in language. This same trend is evident for face perception too: young infants have no difficulty discriminating two faces, whether the faces are humans or non-human primates. By contrast, older infants and adults can only discriminate two human faces. Our research suggests that during this same period of development, babies are learning rapidly about the music of their culture.

We are now investigating whether or not there are there sensitive periods in music learning-- times during development when listeners are especially likely to learn from the music in their environment. We also hope to investigate what this learning can tell us about the development of culture-specific musical knowledge. We assume that the reason one-year-olds learn so readily from the at-home listening is because their culture-specific musical knowledge is weaker and more malleable than that of adults. We therefore recently conducted a study asking children and adults to listen to foreign music with irregular rhythms at home for a few weeks. So far, it seems that even Kindergarteners learn from passive listening, whereas pre-teens and adults learn the least! We are also trying to see if music training influences learning and sensitivity to familiar and foreign metrical structures. Finally, we are exploring how adults learn about unfamiliar rhythmic structures and the role of self-generated movement (i.e. learning to dance). Although adults generally do not learn from casual listening experiences (as infants and children do) they may have an easier time learning novel rhythms under some circumstances.

Parallels Between Music and Speech

As infants knowledge becomes increasingly specific to their native culture, so too might they begin to develop different and specific expectations about sounds that are musical versus sounds that are linguistic. We know that adults have specialized perceptual and neural processes for speech (many of which appear to be language-specific), and recent evidence suggests that the same may be true for music. In our lab, we are investigating the development of speech- and music-specific perceptual biases in simple artificial learning tasks.

1. 1.If an infants auditory environment contains a high degree of overlap between structures in music and speech, this might suggest that there is overlap in early representations of sound. To investigate this question we have been examining language-specific rhythmic differences found in both the speech and music of a given culture. Specifically, English speech and music tends to be more rhythmically variable than French speech and music. We have found that such differences not only exist in music and speech, but that they are perceived by adult listeners, who can categorize either French or English instrumental songs on the basis of their language-specific rhythmic properties. Concurrently we are analyzing folk music compiled for adults and children to see if language-specific rhythmic differences are exaggerated in music for children.
   

2. 2.We are measuring whether or not infants and children can also discriminate speech utterances and instrumental songs on the basis of language/culture-specific rhythms, and whether or not preferences for songs are influenced by infants’ native language and monolingual/bilingual status.
   

3. 3.We are examining the kinds of rules that adults infer from sequences of novel sound patterns that could be heard as either speech or music. We find that in a speech context adults fail to learn syllable patterns based on “melody” but that they readily learn the same patterns presented in a musical context. We are currently investigating the effects of instructions and top-down expectations on this task, as well as linguistic experience (whether or not individuals speak a tone language such as Mandarin Chinese). In addition, we are investigating how children and infants learn about such patterns and whether or not they also have similar language- and music-specific biases in pattern learning.
   

4. 4.We are beginning a number of studies that investigate the influence of specific musical or linguistic experience (i.e. learning to play a musical instrument, learning to dance, learning a specific foreign language, etc.) on general cognitive abilities. For example, we hope to understand whether or not music training can improve your ability to learn a new language and vice versa.
   

Intermodal Perception of Music

1. 1.Even though young infants cannot yet dance in precise time with music, our previous work has shown that they can infer the underlying beat in simple rhythmic patterns. In current work we are investigating whether infants can detect audiovisual asynchronies in real musical contexts, such as when a dancer is moving in synchrony or out-of-synchrony with real music. If infants can succeed at this task, it would suggest that basic metrical perceptions emerge early in life and can guide temporal expectations in both the auditory and visual domains.
   

2. 2.We want to understand how temporal information is perceived and remembered in different sensory modalities (i.e. auditory and visual and somatosensory). In one of our studies, we are trying to measure differences in rhythm perception as a function of modality, and whether experience (age and experience with the world or special training such as dance) can influence how well we process patterns in auditory and visual modalities.