Music and Speech Processing in the First Year of Life

In drawing parallels between speech and music, the chapter focuses on two principal issues: the input provided by caregivers for their infants and the processing of such input by infant listeners.

Abstract

This chapter focuses on potential similarities between speech and music from the perspective of infant listeners. The stimuli of concern are sound sequences rather than single sounds, despite the predominant research focusing on the latter class of stimuli. The exclusion of single sounds can be justified on a number of grounds. First, several comprehensive reviews of infants' ability to perceive single speech and non-speech sounds are available. Second, evidence indicates that global patterns of speech are more salient in the pre-linguistic period than are individual speech segments. In the non-speech domain, evidence also indicates that infants proceed from global processing of auditory patterns to local processing of pattern details. In drawing parallels between speech and music, the chapter focuses on two principal issues: the input provided by caregivers for their infants and the processing of such input by infant listeners. Much of the work to be reported, particularly in the musical domain, is relatively recent. As a result, the exposition is tentative rather than definitive, its purpose being to suggest new avenues for future research and thinking.