Auditory pattern perception in infants and young children

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Previous NSERC funding has enabled me to document the precocious music perception skills of infants. Infants notice most of the subtleties of music that adults notice. However, they sometimes surprise us by noticing subtleties in pitch and rhythm that adults fail to notice. The overall goal of the proposed research is to explore perceptual and learning biases in early life and their consequences for music and speech perception and memory. In the next grant period, I plan to examine four principal questions. The first is the relative ease with which listeners of different ages overcome inherent or acquired perceptual biases. Biases against dissonant music have prevented 20th and 21st century atonal compositions from achieving widespread popularity. Surprisingly, infants exhibit comparable biases. We plan to test 6-month-olds, 12-month-olds and adults on their detection of subtle pitch changes in the context of atonal (dissonant) music. We will also determine whether exposure to atonal music can improve 12-month-olds' and adults' perception of its pitch patterning. The second question involves memory for sound patterns. Music and speech are so engaging for young listeners that their memory for specific musical pieces and voices is often enduring. In one experiment, I plan to examine infants' memory for music and voices from videos that they watched at home. The third question concerns children who were born deaf but learned to "hear" through auditory prostheses known as cochlear implants. I plan to assess their ability to match voices and music from their favorite television programs with images from those programs. The fourth question concerns childhood bilingualism. There are many advantages to bilingualism, cognitive as well as social. I will examine whether there are minor perceptual costs to bilingualism in the early years. Specifically, I will compare bilingual children's ability to decipher degraded speech (i.e., speech with many pitch cues removed) to that of monolingual children. The proposed program of research is expected to increase our understanding of the course of auditory development in typical and atypical populations of infants and children.