Infants' perception of melodies: the role of melodic contour.

Infants 8-11 months of age were exposed to repetitions of a 6-tone sequence or melody, then tested for their discrimination of transpositions of that sequence as well as other melodic transformations previously used by Massaro, Kallman, and Kelly with adults. In experiment 1, infants showed evidence of discriminating all transformations from the original melody. In Experiment 2, the task was made more difficult, and infants failed to discriminate transpositions of the original melody as well as transformations that preserved the melodic contour and approximate frequency range of the original melody. By contrast, infants showed evidence of discriminating transformations that violated the contour of the original melody or that included changes in the octaves from which component tones were drawn. This global processing strategy parallels that used by adults with atonal or unfamiliar tonal melodies.

[1]  G. A. Miller,et al.  The Trill Threshold , 1950 .

[2]  B. White.  Recognition of distorted melodies. , 1960, The American journal of psychology.

[3]  D. Deutsch.  Music recognition. , 1969, Psychological review.

[4]  R. Mccall,et al.  Amount of Short-Term Familiarization and the Response to Auditory Discrepancies. , 1970 .

[5]  R. Mccall,et al.  Attentional responsesof five-month girls to discrepant auditory stimuli. , 1970, Child development.

[6]  W. Dowling,et al.  Contour, interval, and pitch recognition in memory for melodies. , 1971, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[7]  F. Attneave,et al.  Pitch as a medium: a new approach to psychophysical scaling. , 1971, The American journal of psychology.

[8]  A. Bregman,et al.  Primary auditory stream segregation and perception of order in rapid sequences of tones. , 1971, Journal of experimental psychology.

[9]  Diana Deutsch,et al.  Octave generalization and tune recognition , 1972 .

[10]  L. V. Noorden.  Temporal coherence in the perception of tone sequences , 1975 .

[11]  Chris L. S. Coryn,et al.  Short-term memory , 1975 .

[12]  J Kagan,et al.  Infant attention to auditory discrepancy. , 1976, Child development.

[13]  R. Eilers,et al.  Developmental changes in speech discrimination in infants. , 1977, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[14]  L. Demany,et al.  Rhythm perception in early infancy , 1977, Nature.

[15]  S E Trehub,et al.  Infants' perception of temporal grouping in auditory patterns. , 1977, Child development.

[16]  Sandra E. Trehub,et al.  Auditory Processing of Relational Information by Young Infants , 1977 .

[17]  D Deutsch,et al.  Delayed pitch comparisons and the principle of proximity , 1978, Perception & psychophysics.

[18]  W. Dowling.  Scale and contour: Two components of a theory of memory for melodies. , 1978 .

[19]  D W Massaro,et al.  A bidimensional model of pitch in the recognition of melodies , 1978, Perception & psychophysics.

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

[21]  D. Deutsch,et al.  Octave generalization and the consolidation of melodic information. , 1979, Canadian journal of psychology.

[22]  R. Eilers,et al.  Speech discrimination in the language-innocent and the language-wise: a study in the perception of voice onset time , 1979, Journal of Child Language.

[23]  D W Massaro,et al.  Tone chroma is functional in melody recognition , 1979, Perception & psychophysics.

[24]  P. Kuhl.  Speech perception in early infancy: perceptual constancy for spectrally dissimilar vowel categories. , 1979, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[25]  D W Massaro,et al.  The role of tone height, melodic contour, and tone chroma in melody recognition. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human learning and memory.

[26]  J. Bartlett,et al.  Recognition of transposed melodies: a key-distance effect in developmental perspective. , 1980, Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance.

[27]  D B Pisoni,et al.  Discrimination of voice onset time by human infants: new findings and implications for the effects of early experience. , 1981, Child development.

[28]  J. Werker,et al.  Developmental aspects of cross-language speech perception. , 1981, Child development.

[29]  W. D. Ward,et al.  Recognition of musical key: Exploratory study , 1982 .

[30]  Speech discrimination in preschool children: a comparison of two tasks. , 1982, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[31]  L. Demany.  Auditory stream segregation in infancy , 1982 .

[32]  P. Morse,et al.  The categorization of male and female voices in infancy , 1982 .

[33]  W. Jay Dowling,et al.  13 – Melodic Information Processing and Its Development , 1982 .