Pitch and rhythmic patterns affecting infants' sensitivity to musical phrase structure.

The present studies were undertaken to learn more about the nature of the cues that underlie infants' perception of musical phrase structure. Experiment 1 demonstrated that infants in Krumhansl and Jusczyk's (1990) study were responding to the phrase structure instead of to the beginnings and endings of Mozart minuet stimuli. Experiment 2 showed that infants treat musical passages with pauses inserted at phrase boundaries much as they do unaltered versions of the same passages. Experiments 3 and 4 indicated that the direction of change in pitch height and tone duration is critical to obtaining longer orientation times to musical passages that are segmented at phrase boundaries. Finally, Experiment 5 demonstrates that different effects found for the forward and reversed versions of the passages with inserted pauses are not the result of an intrinsic preference for the forward versions.

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