Abstract
Neurocognitive and genetic approaches have made progress in understanding language-music interaction in the adult brain. Although there is broad agreement that learning processes affect how we represent, comprehend, and produce language and music, there is little understanding of the content and dynamics of the early language-music environment in the first years of life. A developmental-ecological approach sees learning and development as fundamentally embedded in a child’s environment, and thus requires researchers to move outside of the lab to understand what children are seeing, hearing, and doing in their daily lives. In this paper, after first reviewing the limitations of traditional developmental approaches to understanding language-music interaction, we describe how a developmental-ecological approach can not only inform developmental theories of language-music learning, but also address challenges inherent to neurocognitive and genetic approaches. We then make suggestions for how researchers can best use the developmental-ecological approach to understand the similarities, differences, and co-occurrences in early music and language input.
Highlights
In the last decades, scientists have made significant progress in understanding language-music interactions using an array of neurocognitive and genetic approaches
How we interact with our environment over time is what creates adult cognition, and so we must understand the conditions under which cognitive structures develop, from as early as possible, in as much detail as possible
Because this approach is rooted in the fact that development happens minute-to-minute, day-to-day, in a particular environment, it often involves the capture and description of continuous multi-modal recordings of infants’ daily life
Summary
Scientists have made significant progress in understanding language-music interactions using an array of neurocognitive and genetic approaches. The developmental-ecological approach (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; West and King, 1987; Adolph, 2019) builds on the view that an adult’s brain and behavior is the product of interactions between the environment and biology throughout development. From this perspective, how we interact with our environment over time is what creates adult cognition, and so we must understand the conditions under which cognitive structures develop, from as early as possible, in as much detail as possible. We make recommendations for conducting naturalistic research on early language-music input from a developmental-ecological perspective
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