Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examined infants’ ability to perceive changes in the pitch contour of music and speech and its developmental changes. Japanese 6- and 10-month-old infants were habituated to a five-note-melody and a five-syllable Japanese non-word and tested with both the habituated and non-habituated stimuli of different pitch contours. The infants of neither age group detected the pitch changes in the music melodies, whereas both did for speech. Infant performances in music and speech were moderately correlated among the 6-month-olds but not the 10-month-olds. These results suggest that the perception of pitch contour changes in a five-unit sound sequence has developed by 6 months of age for speech, especially in a pitch-accent language, but not music. The perception of pitch contour may be domain-general at the age of 6 months, and it may develop via two different pathways during the latter half of the first year after birth.