Lecture 16/17 - Music Flashcards
Organization in musical memory in children
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?
word learning
stager and werker
infants could not learn novel objects are “bih” or “dih”
we may not organize musical melody around melodic characteristics
other factors: lyrics, instrumentation
Stager and Werker
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
discriminating speech sounds
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”
development of memory
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
something similar going on in the domain of music perception
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)
can you find out where infants are sorting out abs pitch?
kids are bad at doing pitch contour (relative pitch)
things in music that are similar for kids
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
things hard for kids
bassoon: play things back to back: ascending, descending = hard to discriminate these two (cartoon creature association)
pitch contour sensitivy
happens early in life as illustrated by the children’s easy ability to distinguish between timbre when pitch contour is exactly the same
discrimination vs. mapping
experiment
- 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”
-
discrimination-mapping asymmetry results
- timbre 1 vs. timbre 2
- 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
discrimination-mapping asymmetry results
rising vs. falling pitch contours
- 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
why can’t they do rising vs. falling pitch contours ??
infants are sensitive to contour!
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
4-5 year olds can’t distinguish emotional prosody
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)
U-function
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
young kids can recognize, produce familiar melody!
must be getting something related to pitch contour?
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
discrimination-mapping aysmmetries
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
familiarity in music
how good are kids at recognizing “mispronunciations” in familiar melodies?
ex: very good at detecting changing a note in twinkle twinkle
what are children learning anyway
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)
it’s hard to pronounce words with
low probability combinations of sounds
suggests that adults don’t have these separate speech sound representations
