Auditory pattern perception in infants and young children

以前的NSERC资助使我能够记录婴儿早熟的音乐感知技能。婴儿能注意到大人能注意到的音乐的大部分微妙之处。然而，他们有时会让我们感到惊讶，因为他们注意到了成年人没有注意到的音调和节奏的微妙之处。拟议研究的总体目标是探索早期生活中的感知和学习偏见及其对音乐和言语感知和记忆的影响。在下一个赠款期间，我计划研究四个主要问题。第一个是不同年龄的听众克服固有或后天感知偏差的相对容易程度。对不和谐音乐的偏见阻碍了20世纪和21世纪无调性作品的广泛流行。令人惊讶的是，婴儿表现出类似的偏见。我们计划测试6个月大、12个月大和成人在无调性（不和谐）音乐背景下对细微音高变化的检测。我们还将确定接触无调性音乐是否可以改善12个月大的婴儿和成年人对其音高模式的感知。第二个问题涉及对声音模式的记忆。音乐和演讲对年轻听众来说是如此吸引人，以至于他们对特定音乐片段和声音的记忆往往是持久的。在一个实验中，我计划检查婴儿对他们在家里观看的音乐和声音视频的记忆。第三个问题是关于那些天生失聪，但通过被称为耳蜗植入的听觉假体学会“听”的孩子。我计划评估他们将他们最喜欢的电视节目中的声音和音乐与这些节目中的图像相匹配的能力。第四个问题是关于儿童双语问题。双语在认知和社交方面都有很多优势。我将研究是否有轻微的知觉成本双语在早年。具体来说，我将比较双语儿童破译退化语音的能力（即，去除了许多音高线索的语音）到单语儿童的语音。拟议的研究计划预计将增加我们对婴儿和儿童的典型和非典型人群的听觉发展过程的理解。

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.