I nfants and children are able to track statistical regularities in perceptual input, which allows them to acquire structural aspects of language and music, such as syntax. However, much more is known about the development of linguistic compared to musical syntax. In the present study, we examined 3.5-year-olds’ implicit knowledge of Western musical pitch structure using electroencephalography (EEG). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while children listened to chord sequences that either 1) followed Western harmony rules, 2) ended on a chord that went outside the key, or 3) ended on an in-key but less expected chord harmonically. Whereas adults tend to show an early right anterior negativity (ERAN) in response to unexpected chords ( Koelsch, 2009 ), 3.5-year-olds in our study showed an immature response that was positive rather than negative in polarity. Our results suggest that very young children exhibit implicit knowledge of the pitch structure of Western music years before they have been shown to demonstrate that knowledge in behavioral tasks.

Moving in synchrony with others encourages prosocial behavior. Adults who walk, sing, or tap together are later more likely to be cooperative, helpful, and rate each other as likeable. Our previous studies demonstrated that interpersonal synchrony encourages helpfulness even in 14-month-old infants. However, in those studies, infants always experienced interpersonal synchrony in a musical context. Here we investigated whether synchronous movement in a nonmusical context has similar effects on infant helpfulness. Fourteen-month-olds were bounced gently while the experimenter faced the infant and bounced with them either in- or out-of-synchrony. In contrast to our previous studies, instead of listening to music during this interpersonal movement phase while being bounced, infants listened to nonrhythmic nature sounds. We then tested infant prosociality directed toward the experimenter. Results showed that synchronous bouncing still encouraged more prosociality than asynchronous bouncing, despite the absence of music. However, helping was more delayed and fussiness rates were much higher than in our previous studies with music. Thus music may not be necessary for interpersonal synchrony to influence infant helpfulness, but the presence of music may act as a mood regulator or distractor to help keep infants happy and allow them to fully experience the effects of synchronous movement.

Adults can extract the underlying beat from music, and entrain their movements with that beat. Although infants and children are poor at synchronizing their movements to auditory stimuli, recent findings suggest they are perceptually sensitive to the beat. We examined five-year-old children’s perceptual sensitivity to musical beat alignment (adapting the adult task of Iversen & Patel, 2008). We also examined whether sensitivity is affected by metric complexity, and whether perceptual sensitivity correlates with cognitive skills. On each trial of the complex Beat Alignment Test (cBAT) children were presented with two successive videos of puppets drumming to music with simple or complex meter. One puppet’s drumming was synchronized with the beat of the music while the other had either incorrect tempo or incorrect phase, and children were asked to select the better drummer. In two experiments, five-year-olds were able to detect beat misalignments in simple meter music significantly better than beat misalignments in complex meter music for both phase errors and tempo errors, with performance for complex meter music at chance levels. Although cBAT performance correlated with short-term memory in Experiment One, the relationship held for both simple and complex meter, so cannot explain the superior performance for culturally typical meters.

previous research has found that music training in childhood is associated with word decoding, a fundamental reading skill related to the ability to pronounce individual words. These findings have typically been explained by a near transfer mechanism because music lessons train auditory abilities associated with those needed for decoding words. Nevertheless, few studies have examined whether music training is associated with higher-level reading abilities such as reading comprehension, which would suggest far transfer. We tested whether the length of time children took music lessons was associated with word decoding and reading comprehension skills in 6- to 9-year-old normal-achieving readers. Our results revealed that length of music training was not associated with word decoding skills; however, length of music training predicted reading comprehension performance even after controlling for age, socioeconomic status, auditory perception, full-scale IQ, the number of hours that children spent reading per week, and word decoding skills. We suggest that if near transfer occurs, it is likely strongest in beginning readers or those experiencing reading difficulty. The strong association in our data—between length of music training and reading comprehension—is consistent with mechanisms involving far transfer.

Even adults without formal music training have implicit musical knowledge that they have acquired through day-to-day exposure to the music of their culture. Two of the more sophisticated musical abilities to develop in childhood are knowledge of key membership (which notes belong in a key) and harmony (chords and chord progressions). Previous research suggests sensitivity to key membership by 4 or 5 years, but provides no behavioral evidence of harmony perception until 6 or 7. Thus, we examined knowledge of key membership and harmony in 4- and 5-year-old children using a simple task and a familiar song. In line with previous research, we found that even the youngest children had acquired key membership. Furthermore, even 4-year-olds demonstrated some knowledge of Western harmony, which continued to develop between 4 and 5 years of age. In sum, our results indicate that harmony perception begins to develop earlier than has been previously suggested.

IN MOST ADULTS, PITCH MEMORY FOR SINGLE tones is of short duration, and the presence of interference reduces performance in pitch matching tasks.We show that 6-month-old infants can remember the pitch of a tone for at least 2.5 s but that, like adults, their memory is disrupted by tones interpolated between repetitions of the tone-to-be-remembered. For both infants and adults, we found a significant negative correlation between the number of interference tones and proportion correct in detecting a change in pitch. Performance reached chance levels with 5 interference tones for infants, and 15 interference tones for adults. This indicates that although there may be a developmental increase with age in the length of time a memory can be held, for both 6-month-old infants and adults, memory for the absolute pitch of isolated tones fades rapidly.

McDermott and Hauser (2005) and Justus and Hutsler (2005) argue that in order for music to be an evolutionary adaptation, and not an exaptation, music must be constrained by innate factors that are specific to music and that evolved because music conferred survival advantages. I argue that the dichotomy between adaptation and exaptation is not very clear for higher cognitive functions such as music and language, because genes set up general neural architectures and learning mechanisms, rather than specifying the details of what they will represent, and that such higher cognitive functions are therefore dependent on interactions between genes and experience. Furthermore, because higher cognitive functions depend on a common set of mechanisms such as sensory encoding strategies, working memory capacity, working memory processes, longterm memory encoding and retrieval, and attentional focusing, it is difficult to make arguments about innate specificity. Thus, the question of whether music is an evolutionary adaptation appears to depend on whether or not music conferred survival advantages, a question that is difficult to answer.

The preferences of 2- and 4-month-old infants for consonant versus dissonant two-tone intervals was tested by using a looking-time preference procedure. Infants of both ages preferred to listen to consonant over dissonant intervals and found it difficult to recover interest after a sequence of dissonant trials. Thus, sensitivity to consonance and dissonance is found before knowledge of scale structure and may be based on the innate structure of the inner ear and the firing characteristics of the auditory nerve. It is likely that consonance perception provides a bootstrap into the task of learning the pitch structure of the musical system to which the infant is exposed.

Fathers were recorded singing a song once to their infants and once in the absence of their infants. Adults readily identified fathers' infant-directed renditions and rated them as more rhythmic, loving, and appropriate for infants than the infant-absent renditions. Unlike mothers, however, fathers did not consistently raise the pitch of their infant-directed versions. Moreover,infants showed no preference for infant-directed over infant-absent versions unless the infant-directed versions were higher in pitch. Nevertheless, infants showed greater visual attention when listening to fathers' singing than to mothers' singing. The results confirm that a distinctive infant-directed style is used by singing fathers as well as mothers, that pitch height is a salient dimension of songs for infant listeners, and that fathers' singing in general is highly engaging to infant listeners.

In this paper, the claim that the major triad has special status for infant as well as adult listeners is evaluated. In Experiment 1, infants and adults were required to detect a downward semitone change in a fivenote melody based on the major triad and in another five-note melody based on the augmented triad. Both infants and adults performed significantly better on the major triad melody. In Experiment 2, infants and adults were evaluated on their detection of a downward semitone change in a five-note melody that incorporated a perfect fifth or augmented fifth relation but that also contained non-Western intervals. Again, infants and adults performed significantly better on the melody that incorporated the perfect fifth relation. These findings imply that enhanced processing of perfect fifth relations may account for infants' and adults' effective processing of the major triad.

We explored the development of children's ability to relate musical forms to extramusical concepts. In Experiment 1, we presented four excerpts from Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and asked 4-and 6-yearold children to match each excerpt to a picture of a wolf, bird, cat, or duck (four-alternative forced choice). Children matched appropriate animal pictures to musical excerpts significantly better than chance but identified the wolf and bird more readily than the cat and duck excerpts. In Experiment 2, 3-year-olds participated in a simplified version of the task (two-alternative forced choice). The order of difficulty of matching the various music-animal pairs was comparable across all age groups. In Experiment 3, we replicated Experiment 1 with less familiar music, specifically Saint Saen's Carnival of the Animals. Again, performance was above chance, increasing the likelihood that children's success in Experiments 1 and 2 was not attributable to previous exposure to the music. We discuss the results in relation to theories of musical meaning.