The sound of timbre reigns: Auditory sequence discrimination in 3–5-year-old children

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do young children apprehend the sounds in their environments? The current study elucidates a recent finding that 3–5-year-olds have greater sensitivity to timbre – non-pitch-related spectral and dynamic attributes that differentiate sounds – than to pitch contour. This finding is somewhat surprising given that pitch contour underlies much of linguistic prosody and music recognition. Further, it represents a gap in scientific knowledge about nonspeech auditory perception, which is commonly linked to, and used to remediate, speech perception. Two hypotheses are explored: the temporal order hypothesis (that pitch contour discrimination is more difficult because it requires encoding the order of pitches, while timbre discrimination does not); the perceptual distance hypothesis (that previously tested timbres were more auditorily distant to children than pitches were, and thus that greater perceptual distance even within a dimension should lead to better discrimination). Three same-different discrimination experiments with 3–5-year-old children suggested that temporal order variation makes timbre change detection harder, but does not affect pitch change detection, and that more-distant pitch changes are better detected (CG vs. GC is easier than CD vs. DC), with hints at such an effect for timbre. Findings raise the possibility of a trade-off such that auditory perceptual distance aids detection only up to a point, past which sounds cohere less well, impeding apprehension of temporal order. Implications for auditory and spoken language development are discussed.