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294 Erin McMullen & Jenny R. Saffrannotes and chords. However, no experiments using artificial musical grammarinduction techniques have tested this hypothesis specifically, so conclusionsmust be somewhat more tentative than in the linguistic case.THE PROSODIC STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE AND MUSICMoving beyond the segmental level (phonemes and tones), it is clear thatthe suprasegmental cues in both language and music are highly salient toinfants. These patterns of rhythm, stress, intonation, phrasing, and contourmost likely drive much of the early processing in both domains. Suchprosodic information is the first human-produced external sound sourceavailable in utero; the filtering properties of the fluid-filled reproductivesystem leave rhythmic cues intact relative to high-frequency information.Fetuses avail themselves of the incoming rhythmic patterns; again, this is aprocess of implicit, nonreinforced learning. For example, newborn infantsprefer their mother’s voice on the basis of prenatal learning (DeCasper &Fifer, 1980). Fetal learning also encompasses the rhythmic patterns of themother’s native language, allowing newborn infants to use this experienceto differentiate between languages (Mehler et al., 1988). It is likely thatinfants acquire specific information about musical rhythmic informationin their prenatal environments as well, assuming sufficient exposure andquality of auditory input (maternal singing is presumably the best sourceof such input).After birth, infants continue to be attuned to prosodic information inboth domains. This may be in part due to learning in the womb. It is alsolikely a function of the richness of the prosodic structure in the infants’environments. Both linguistic and musical input are modified by caregiversin ways that appear to be maximally attractive to infants. Infant-directedspeech, in comparison to adult-directed speech, is characterized cross-linguisticallyby a slower rate of speech, higher fundamental frequency, greaterrange of pitch variation, longer pauses, and characteristic repetitive intonationcontours (Fernald, 1992). Other modifications also might enhanceearly learning; for example, vowels in infant-directed speech are producedin a more extreme manner, resulting in heightened distinctiveness betweenvowel categories (Kuhl, Andruski, Chistovich, & Chistovich, 1997). Infant-directedspeech captures infants’ attention more readily than adultdirectedspeech (Cooper & Aslin, 1990; Fernald, 1985). Moreover, learningappears to be facilitated by the exaggerated prosodic contours ofinfant-directed speech; infants detect word boundaries in fluent speech morereadily when the same items are spoken with infant-directed prosody asopposed to adult-directed prosody (Thiessen, Hill, & Saffran, 2004).Caregivers also engage musically with their infants in ways that differfrom adult-directed music. The play-songs and lullabies that dominate in-
Learning Music and Language295fant-directed music share features cross-culturally, including simple, repeatedpitch contours (e.g., Trehub & Trainor, 1998). This is sensible, as contouris one of the first aspects of music to be discriminated by infants (Trehub,2003). Interestingly, renditions of caregivers’ songs tend to be sung at thesame pitch; when a given mother is recorded singing a particular song ondifferent days, she will tend to use the same key and absolute pitches(Bergeson & Trehub, 2002). As with infant-directed speech, these songsare preferred by infants from early in life (e.g., Masataka, 1999; Trainor,1996). In both domains, the affective properties of the infant-directed registerappear to be central; before the availability of other forms of communication,the prosodic contours in these two domains are a primary meansof transmitting emotional information (for a recent review, see Trehub,2003).Prosodic cues may also play a role in delineating the structural informationthat infants must learn to process in language and music. Prosodiccues are probabilistically correlated with structural boundaries such asclausal and phrasal units; for example, ends of clauses in speech are markedby syllable lengthening and a drop in pitch. The preferential listening methodologyhas been used assess the degree to which infants are aware of thesecorrelations. By 7 months of age, infants listen longer to speech samples inwhich pauses fall at clause boundaries than to speech samples in whichpauses are placed clause-internally (Hirsh-Pasek, Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk,& Cassidy, 1987). Interestingly, this is only the case when the speech samplesare derived from infant-directed speech; the more muted prosodic structureof adult-directed speech does not facilitate the detection of structuralboundaries by infants (Kemler Nelson, Jusczyk, Hirsh-Pasek, & Cassidy,1989). The results of these and similar experiments (see Jusczyk, 1997, fora review) suggest that infants detected whether or not the pauses matchedwith the other prosodic boundary markers in the speech. Similar resultsemerge from studies using musical materials (Mozart minuets); infants listenlonger to musical passages where pauses are placed at the ends of phrasesrather than in the middles of phrases (Jusczyk & Krumhansl, 1993;Krumhansl & Jusczyk, 1990). Analysis of the musical materials suggeststhat the same prosodic markers function at musical phrase boundaries asobserved with linguistic materials: a decline in pitch and a lengthening ofthe final note. It remains an open question whether infants are using thesame mechanism to detect these parallel cues across domains, or whetherinstead they have learned about these similar prosodic properties independently.Linguistic prosody and musical structure within a given culture may alsorelate in a more specific fashion. It is known that languages vary in theiroverall patterns of prosodic stress. Similarly, certain nationalistic styles ofmusic are distinguished by their usage of certain characteristic rhythmic
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