Tuning in to musical rhythms: infants learn more readily than adults.

Domain-general tuning processes may guide the acquisition of perceptual knowledge in infancy. Here, we demonstrate that 12-month-old infants show an adult-like, culture-specific pattern of responding to musical rhythms, in contrast to the culture-general responding that is evident at 6 months of age. Nevertheless, brief exposure to foreign music enables 12-month-olds, but not adults, to perceive rhythmic distinctions in foreign musical contexts. These findings may indicate a sensitive period early in life for acquiring rhythm in particular or socially and biologically important structures more generally.

[1]  L. Trainor,et al.  Feeling the Beat: Movement Influences Infant Rhythm Perception , 2005, Science.

[2]  Scott P. Johnson,et al.  Infants use meter to categorize rhythms and melodies: Implications for musical structure learning , 2005, Cognitive Psychology.

[3]  S. Trehub,et al.  Metrical Categories in Infancy and Adulthood , 2005, Psychological science.

[4]  P. Kuhl.  Early language acquisition: cracking the speech code , 2004, Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

[5]  I. Gauthier,et al.  Computational approaches to the development of perceptual expertise , 2004, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[6]  P. Kuhl,et al.  Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning , 2003, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[7]  Peter Desain,et al.  The Formation of Rhythmic Categories and Metric Priming , 2003, Perception.

[8]  Naoyuki Takagi,et al.  The limits of training Japanese listeners to identify English /r/ and /l/: eight case studies. , 2002, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[9]  O. Pascalis,et al.  Is Face Processing Species-Specific During the First Year of Life? , 2002, Science.

[10]  Robert O. Gjerdingen,et al.  The Psychology of Music , 1972 .

[11]  Jessica Maye,et al.  Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination , 2002, Cognition.

[12]  Y. Munakata.  Graded representations in behavioral dissociations , 2001, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[13]  Elizabeth K. Johnson,et al.  Language Discrimination by English-Learning 5-Month-Olds: Effects of Rhythm and Familiarity , 2000 .

[14]  G. Yeni-Komshian,et al.  Age Constraints on Second-Language Acquisition , 1999 .

[15]  R N Aslin,et al.  Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants , 1996, Science.

[16]  C. Wright,et al.  Temporal rescaling of simple and complex ratios in rhythmic tapping. , 1995 .

[17]  C. Wright,et al.  Temporal rescaling of sample and complex rations in rhythmic tapping. , 1995, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[18]  Weiting Ng,et al.  Cross-Race Facial Recognition , 1994 .

[19]  Matthew Flatt,et al.  PsyScope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers , 1993 .

[20]  K. Stevens,et al.  Linguistic experience alters phonetic perception in infants by 6 months of age. , 1992, Science.

[21]  A. G. Goldstein,et al.  Effects of training on Japanese face recognition: Reduction of the other-race effect , 1985 .

[22]  D. Deutsch,et al.  The Psychology of Music , 1983 .

[23]  D J Povel,et al.  Internal representation of simple temporal patterns. , 1981, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[24]  P. D. Eimas,et al.  Speech Perception in Infants , 1971, Science.

[25]  David Attenborough,et al.  The trials of life , 1990 .

[26]  M. Lévesque.  Perception , 1986, The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine.

[27]  P. Essens,et al.  Metrical and nonmetrical representations of temporal patterns , 1985, Perception & psychophysics.