Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance Tipping the Scales: Auditory Cue Weighting Changes Over Development

How does auditory processing change over development? This study assessed preschoolers' and adults' sensitivity to pitch contour, pitch height, and timbre in an association-memory paradigm, with both explicit (overt recognition) and implicit measures (visual fixations to melody-linked objects). In the first 2 experiments, child and adult participants associated each of 2 melodies with a cartoon picture, and recognition was tested. Experiment 1 pitted pitch contour cues against pitch height cues, and Experiment 2 pitted contour cues against timbre cues. Although adults were sensitive to multiple cues, children responded predominantly based on pitch height and timbre, with little sensitivity to pitch contour. In Experiment 3, however, children detected changes to all 3 cues well above chance levels. Results overall suggest that contour differences, although readily perceptible, are less memorable to children than to adults. Gradual perceptual learning over development may increase the memorability of pitch contour. How and why does perception change across development? In the auditory domain, we know that speech sound processing changes across developmental time with exposure to the native language (e.g., Werker & Tees, 1984). Less is known about other aspects of auditory perception. Particularly important for music perception is relative pitch—processing relations between successive pitches (pitch contours or pitch intervals; e.g., Bartlett & Dowling, 1980) rather than the absolute pitches themselves. Processing pitch relations is particularly important because these relations distinguish melodies from each other: Happy Birthday is still Happy Birthday whether it is sung by a soprano or a bass (a large difference in absolute pitch), and whether it is played on a kazoo or a xylophone (a large difference in timbre). How early in development is relative pitch a central factor in children's music representations? At least three perspectives in the literature relate to this question. First is a developmental stability perspective: Children are sensitive to relative pitch, particularly contour, beginning in infancy Second is developmental shift: Early in life, children are more sensitive to absolute pitch than to relative pitch, gradually shifting toward relative pitch processing (e.g., Saffran & Griepentrog, 2001). A third perspective is developmental emergence: Sensitivity to numerous musical properties, not just contour, emerges via experience with musical material (see, e.g., Creel & Jiménez, 2012 for a related account of voice recognition). Developmental emergence thus provides a mechanism— distributional learning—that can drive both overall changes in sensitivity during development, and developmental reweighting of cues (developmental shifts). The present study aimed to …