Timbre discrimination by 7-month-old infants
While previous research has demonstrated the infant's ability to categorize sounds according to their pitch in the presence of irrelevant spectral variations, little or no research has evaluated discrimination of those spectral variations. In the present study, 7- to 8-month-old infants demonst...
Gespeichert in:
Veröffentlicht in: | The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 1985-11, Vol.78 (S1), p.S64-S64 |
---|---|
Hauptverfasser: | , , |
Format: | Artikel |
Sprache: | eng |
Online-Zugang: | Volltext |
Tags: |
Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
|
Zusammenfassung: | While previous research has demonstrated the infant's ability to categorize sounds according to their pitch in the presence of irrelevant spectral variations, little or no research has evaluated discrimination of those spectral variations. In the present study, 7- to 8-month-old infants demonstrated the ability to discriminate harmonic tonal complexes from two timbre categories that differed in their spectral energy distributions. These differences in timbre were identical to the irrelevant variations over which infants categorized sounds in earlier work. In a conditioned head-turning paradigm, infants initially learned to discriminate stimulus tokens that contained the same fundamental frequency, 200 Hz, but different harmonic components (e.g., harmonics 5–10 versus harmonics 3–8 or 7–12). After successfully completing the basic timbre discrimination, the same infants transferred their learning to missing fundamental stimuli that had novel spectral energy distributions (e.g., harmonics 4–9 versus harmonics 2–7 or 6–11). These results suggest that young infants can analyze the spectra of harmonic tonal complexes and discriminate differences in one of the most important cues for adults' timbre perception, the distribution of spectral energy. [Work supported by NSF No. BN583-04419 and NIMH No. MH00332.] |
---|---|
ISSN: | 0001-4966 1520-8524 |
DOI: | 10.1121/1.2022928 |