Infants’ attention to repeated speech and musical patterns

Previous investigations have shown that infants older than 5 months listen longer to speech with repeated utterances than to speech without utterance repetition. The present studies investigated whether infants also attend preferentially to repeated musical patterns. Musical phrases of four and five notes and ending with a rest were composed using several pitch contours and rhythmic patterns. Experiments 1 and 2 compared trials in which phrases were immediately repeated (AABBCC), to trials in which the same phrases occurred without repetition (ABCDE). In the first experiment, no listening preference for either trial type was found for 6- or 9-month-old infants. In experiment 2, silence was added after each phrase to assist infants in parsing the phrases. Infants again failed to show a listening preference. In experiment 3, trials of speech, half with repeated utterances and half without repeated utterances (from previous experiments), were interspersed with trials of repeated and nonrepeated music. Nine-month-olds demonstrated a preference for the repeated trials of both speech and music over nonrepeated trials of the same type. The fact that a preference for musical repetition is only obtained through induction (from verbal repetition) suggests that repeated speech may hold a special attentional status for infants. [Work was supported by Grants NIH—R15/DC005947 and NIH—R01/DC00403.]