Sustained musical beat perception develops into late childhood and predicts phonological abilities.

Sensitivity to auditory rhythmic structures in music and language is evident as early as infancy, but performance on beat perception tasks is often well below adult levels and improves gradually with age. While some research has suggested the ability to perceive musical beat develops early, even in infancy, it remains unclear whether adult-like perception of musical beat is present in children. The capacity to sustain an internal sense of the beat is critical for various rhythmic musical behaviors, yet very little is known about the development of this ability. In this study, 223 participants ranging in age from 4 to 23 years from the Las Vegas, Nevada, community completed a musical beat discrimination task, during which they first listened to a strongly metrical musical excerpt and then attempted to sustain their perception of the musical beat while listening to a repeated, beat-ambiguous rhythm for up to 14.4 s. They then indicated whether a drum probe matched or did not match the beat. Results suggested that the ability to identify the matching probe improved throughout middle childhood (8-9 years) and did not reach adult-like levels until adolescence (12-14 years). Furthermore, scores on the beat perception task were positively related to phonological processing, after accounting for age, short-term memory, and music and dance training. This study lends further support to the notion that children's capacity for beat perception is not fully developed until adolescence and suggests we should reconsider assumptions of musical beat mastery by infants and young children. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Steady state-evoked potentials of subjective beat perception in musical rhythms.

Synchronization of movement to music is a seemingly universal human capacity that depends on sustained beat perception. Previous research has suggested that listener's conscious perception of the musical structure (e.g., beat and meter) might be reflected in neural responses that follow the frequency of the beat. However, the extent to which these neural responses directly reflect concurrent, listener-reported perception of musical beat versus stimulus-driven activity is understudied. We investigated whether steady state-evoked potentials (SSEPs), measured using electroencephalography (EEG), reflect conscious perception of beat by holding the stimulus constant while contextually manipulating listeners' perception and measuring perceptual responses on every trial. Listeners with minimal music training heard a musical excerpt that strongly supported one of two beat patterns (context phase), followed by a rhythm consistent with either beat pattern (ambiguous phase). During the final phase, listeners indicated whether or not a superimposed drum matched the perceived beat (probe phase). Participants were more likely to indicate that the probe matched the music when that probe matched the original context, suggesting an ability to maintain the beat percept through the ambiguous phase. Likewise, we observed that the spectral amplitude during the ambiguous phase was higher at frequencies that matched the beat of the preceding context. Exploratory analyses investigated whether EEG amplitude at the beat-related SSEPs (steady state-evoked potentials) predicted performance on the beat induction task on a single-trial basis, but were inconclusive. Our findings substantiate the claim that auditory SSEPs reflect conscious perception of musical beat and not just stimulus features.

An evolutionary theory of music needs to care about developmental timing.

Both target papers cite evidence from infancy and early childhood to support the notion of human musicality as a somewhat static suite of capacities; however, in our view they do not adequately acknowledge the critical role of developmental timing, the acquisition process, or the dynamics of social learning, especially during later periods of development such as middle childhood.

Exaggeration of Language-Specific Rhythms in English and French Children's Songs.

The available evidence indicates that the music of a culture reflects the speech rhythm of the prevailing language. The normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) is a measure of durational contrast between successive events that can be applied to vowels in speech and to notes in music. Music-language parallels may have implications for the acquisition of language and music, but it is unclear whether native-language rhythms are reflected in children's songs. In general, children's songs exhibit greater rhythmic regularity than adults' songs, in line with their caregiving goals and frequent coordination with rhythmic movement. Accordingly, one might expect lower nPVI values (i.e., lower variability) for such songs regardless of culture. In addition to their caregiving goals, children's songs may serve an intuitive didactic function by modeling culturally relevant content and structure for music and language. One might therefore expect pronounced rhythmic parallels between children's songs and language of origin. To evaluate these predictions, we analyzed a corpus of 269 English and French songs from folk and children's music anthologies. As in prior work, nPVI values were significantly higher for English than for French children's songs. For folk songs (i.e., songs not for children), the difference in nPVI for English and French songs was small and in the expected direction but non-significant. We subsequently collected ratings from American and French monolingual and bilingual adults, who rated their familiarity with each song, how much they liked it, and whether or not they thought it was a children's song. Listeners gave higher familiarity and liking ratings to songs from their own culture, and they gave higher familiarity and preference ratings to children's songs than to other songs. Although higher child-directedness ratings were given to children's than to folk songs, French listeners drove this effect, and their ratings were uniquely predicted by nPVI. Together, these findings suggest that language-based rhythmic structures are evident in children's songs, and that listeners expect exaggerated language-based rhythms in children's songs. The implications of these findings for enculturation processes and for the acquisition of music and language are discussed.