Lecture 16/17 - Music

Question 1

Organization in musical memory in children

Answer 1

what is special about language as related to other areas of cognition?

music doesn’t have meaning in the same way that language does

• melody: ups and downs in pitch patterns
• organized how we think? different contexts, different words: similarity unawareness/awareness = twinkle twinkle is the ABC song
• changes over development?

Question 2

word learning

stager and werker

Answer 2

infants could not learn novel objects are “bih” or “dih”

Question 3

we may not organize musical melody around melodic characteristics

Answer 3

other factors: lyrics, instrumentation

Question 4

Stager and Werker

Answer 4

early in life infants can distinquish between sounds “bih” and “dih” (8 months)

but later infants (14 months) can’t use these sounds to distinguish between two objects = cannot map the sounds to pictures

BUT the 14 months old can map very different sounds (lif and neem) onto pictures

this is a discrimination-mapping asymmetry

Question 5

discriminating speech sounds

Answer 5

habituation paradigm: hear a sound until they’re bored and if they show renued attention to a new sound that’s taken as evidence of discrimination between the two sounds which is taken as evidence for representations of those speech sounds

to learn to distinguish the words “ball” and “doll” you need to know the sounds “b” and “d”

Question 6

development of memory

Answer 6

infants can’t can’t tack new words onto previous info (speech sounds, phonotactics, semantics) : can’t use existing knowledge to learn something new (but it’s only a “little bit new”)

kids representations of new word forms (sound pattern of word) are more hazy

lif and neem are easy to keep distinct because of a more spaced out orientation in representational space: there is more overlap between the representation of dih and bih (hard to keep distinct)

why discrimination gets worse with age: when you have to associate words to meanings bih and dih are more difficult = you need stronger memory representation to map words to meaning rather than just doing sound discrimination

they dishabituate with “switch tasks” (where a ball is shown but they hear DOLL) ball and doll because they have stronger representation for these sound patterns

Question 7

something similar going on in the domain of music perception

Answer 7

is there a change across development from infants perceiving pitch in an absolute fashion (only recognize at original pitch level?)

during development there is shift to processing pitch absolutly to adulthood (where not caring nearly as much: being able to recognize relative relationships between pitches)

Question 8

can you find out where infants are sorting out abs pitch?

Answer 8

kids are bad at doing pitch contour (relative pitch)

Question 9

things in music that are similar for kids

Answer 9

timbre: sound quality apart from pitch: differences between instruments

they can tell the difference between timbre more easily even when pitch contour is exactly the same

Question 10

things hard for kids

Answer 10

bassoon: play things back to back: ascending, descending = hard to discriminate these two (cartoon creature association)

Question 11

pitch contour sensitivy

Answer 11

happens early in life as illustrated by the children’s easy ability to distinguish between timbre when pitch contour is exactly the same

Question 12

discrimination vs. mapping

experiment

Answer 12

• had a favorite song mapping task where kids had to map a song to a cartoon creature
• “point to the creature whose favorite song is being played”

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Question 13

discrimination-mapping asymmetry results

• timbre 1 vs. timbre 2

Answer 13

• quite accurate in discrimination task (whether the two sounds are different)
• also very good at mapping (associating) melodies with characters
• the can associate sound patterns with different cartoon characters

Question 14

discrimination-mapping asymmetry results

rising vs. falling pitch contours

Answer 14

• they can discriminate but not as good in as in timbre case

- SUCK when asked to associate with different characters: just at chance: they can’t really do it

Question 15

why can’t they do rising vs. falling pitch contours ??

infants are sensitive to contour!

Answer 15

what are the infants actually doing in these contour tasks? They’re hearing some repeating standard and then a change: potentially building up a strong representation of one thing which makes it easier to recognize

Question 16

4-5 year olds can’t distinguish emotional prosody

Answer 16

maybe kids can’t attach diff pitch patterns to meaning

they can maybe hear the difference but can’t associate it with diff emotional states or sentence modalities (question vs. statement)

Question 17

U-function

Answer 17

over-regularization of verb forms

early: blew up
middle: blowed up (regularize irregular verbs)
later: blew up (start producing irregulars again)

what’s weird: it looks like you have it, then you don’t, then you do

reasons you have it early and then lose it are different than the reasons you acquire it later

a product of how you process the information

not getting dummer or regressing: working through the data that you’ve been given

early on you haven’t figured out the syntax rule of -ed for the past, then you are exposed to these grammar rules, and then you learn how to correctly apply the rules later (still continues growth even tho it doesn’t necessarily look like that on the surface)

in sound, pitch contours: over-relying on linguist, verbal info

or the verbal info or faces are stronger cues

Question 18

young kids can recognize, produce familiar melody!

must be getting something related to pitch contour?

Answer 18

may have to do with the extreme amount of exposure they’ve had to familiar melodies = these build stronger representations

familiar melodies are kind of like the ball/doll case = stronger words-sound representations to familiar things

maybe that kids are really good for specific types of pitch contours that they’re familiar with, it’s a matter of which ones they know and have had exposure to

Question 19

discrimination-mapping aysmmetries

Answer 19

ARE A GENERAL property of auditory perceptual learning

not specifically about language; not specifically about a particular age group

product of continuous developmental change as you work through the info in your environment

Question 20

familiarity in music

how good are kids at recognizing “mispronunciations” in familiar melodies?

Answer 20

ex: very good at detecting changing a note in twinkle twinkle

Question 21

what are children learning anyway

Answer 21

not just speech sounds

learning speech sounds in the particular context of other speech sounds

learning the sequence: ball or boy or BigBear and maybe overtime those similarities emerge

maybe individual words, plus literacy, add up to apparent knowledge of speech sounds (we think that there’s a “k” sound in knife)

Question 22

it’s hard to pronounce words with

Answer 22

low probability combinations of sounds

suggests that adults don’t have these separate speech sound representations