Year: 2002
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This thesis presents research on music and music listening in infancy. The first part, which concerns musical elements in the infant's environment, examines mothers' singing and speech to infants. In one study (Chapter 1), mothers were recorded speaking and singing to their infants on two occasions separated by one week or more. The pitch level and tempo of mothers' repeated utterances were found to be highly variable across the one-week period, but these features were virtually unchanged in their song repetitions. Moreover, rhythmic patterning was largely maintained in speech, as in song. In a second study (Chapter 2), transcriptions of discernible tunes in mothers' speech revealed that mothers repeated specific tunes not only the same day but also one week later. Moreover, these maternal tunes were individually distinctive. The second part of the thesis concerns infants' perception of rhythm. In one study (Chapter 3), 9-month-old infants' perception of auditory temporal sequences was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, infants detected a change in the context of a metric sequence but not in the context of a nonmetric sequence. When infants heard tone sequences with groups of notes occurring regularly or irregularly within the metric framework (Experiment 2), their performance did not differ significantly. These findings are consistent with processing predispositions for auditory temporal sequences that induce a metric framework. In the final study (Chapter 4), 9-month-old infants listened to tone sequences with temporal or harmonic cues to duple or triple meter. Infants detected a change to the pattern in duple meter but not in the pattern in triple meter whether the meter was cued by temporal or harmonic features. These findings are consistent with processing predispositions for duple meter and, more generally, for binary relations between events. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Bergeson, Tonya R
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7132901664