Development of music-specific pitch processing

Abstract

Both music and speech contain meaningful variations in pitch, however discrete pitch intervals are more prominent in music than they are in speech. Most research has separately examined perception of pitch patterning in the musical and linguistic domains; however, less is known about how listeners flexibly recruit musical and linguistic knowledge to interpret similar pitch patterns across different contexts, nor how these abilities develop with age. We asked children and adults to detect pitch changes to vocal stimuli that were presented in separate blocks as music (part of a “musical”) or speech (part of a “play”). Stimuli were overtly sung (in the musical) or spoken (in the play) but matched in pitch range and contour, and across both contexts we occasionally presented ambiguous vocalizations (speech-to-song illusions). Pitch changes were created by subjecting stimuli to a pitch range expansion which preserved the pitch contour but distorted pitch interval relationships. Adults showed greater detection accuracy for overtly sung than spoken utterances; however, children showed comparable performance for speech and song. No difference was observed for ambiguous vocalizations at any age. Implications for the development of domain-specificity of pitch processing will be discussed.