Neural Correlates of Processing Syntax in Music and ... - PubMan

Music Perception 8
ture of their culture (Olsho, 1984). In Western culture, infants, as a next step, acquire
the semitone structure, i.e., they show no preference yet for semitone changes that are in
accordance with diatonic scale structure. Before they are 4 to 6 years old, they internalize
the diatonic scale structure (Trehub, 1987; Trehub, Cohen, Thorpe, & Morrongiello,
1986).
Tonality induction can be regarded as a musical manifestation of the general psychological
principle of a cognitive reference point within a category (Rosch, 1975). It enables
children (and adults) to encode long sequences of musical information. The induction
of tonality requires a variety of perceptual-cognitive abilities: to resolve frequency,
to infer the pitch of complex tones, to accumulate chroma categories, to remember auditory
events, and to encode harmonic relations between tones. Most of these prerequisites
are present during the first year of life (see above). Initially, infants are presumed to
process music independently of any particular musical system such as Western tonality
(Lynch, Eilers, Oller, & Urbano, 1990; Trehub & Trainor, 1993). As a part of the acquisition
of culture-specific parameters of the own musical culture, infants must learn the
tonal structure and tonal hierarchy (Krumhansl, 1990; Krumhansl & Keil, 1982). A
mechanism to acquire the tonal structure of their culture may be their sensitivity to
statistical regularities in tone sequences (Saffran, Johnson, Aslin, & Newport, 1999).
Memory constraints may also influence the infants ease of acquisition of such regularities
(Cohen, 2000).
Western harmony is a particular cultural elaboration of the sense of tonality. It is assumed
that increasing exposure to the music of its own culture attenuates the effects of
culture-general factors while amplifying the influence of culture-specific factors
(Schellenberg & Trehub, 1999). Before children have acquired the musical regularities
of their culture they may perform differently from adults on certain tasks. Trainor and
Trehub (1992) found that infants (8 months old) did not differ in their performance
when detecting a change in a melody that either went outside the key or remained
within the key and the implied harmony while adults more readily detected the change
that went outside the key. Comparably, Trainor and Trehub (1993) demonstrated that 9
to 11 months old infants performed equally well in detecting changes in a melody that
was based on either major or augmented triads whereas adults performed better in the
discrimination task with a melody based on the major triad (i.e., the more prototypical
for Western melody). Trainor and Trehub (1994) found that implicit knowledge of key
membership seems to be established in 5-year-olds and that of implied harmony in 7year-olds.
Comparable results were obtained by Cuddy and Badertscher (1987) and
Speer and Meeks (1985). Sloboda (1985) also reported superior memory for melodic
sequences conforming to the rules of normal tonal progressions in children at 7 but not