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44 Multiple choice questions

  1. Range of human hearing: 20 - 20,0000 Hz
    Most sensitive range: 2000 - 4000 Hz (both adults and infants)
  2. 2 to 4-day old newborns will turn their head toward sound of a rattle. Some can even track and follow a moving sound (though they aren't too accurate!).By about 6 months, they can get within 4-6 degrees of sound source location. At 7 months, they can reach for a sound in the dark using only their sense of hearing to locate sound.
  3. Saffran et al (2000)

    Experimental group spent significantly more time listening to the novel (unfamiliar) pieces (10/11 infants chose unfamiliar music)
    Control group (who hadn't listened to ANY of the pieces previously) showed no preference for either the familiar or novel pieces (7/14 listened to "familiar" pieces more, 7/14 listened to novel pieces more)
  4. ID Speech (universal):
    Higher in pitch
    Greater fluctuation in pitch and loudness
    Slower tempo
    Shorter phrases
    Exaggerated enunciation
    Longer pauses
  5. Decasper and Fifer: Infants sucked on special pacifer when listening to mother's voice. Prefered mothers voice to other females
  6. Amplitude and frequency
  7. Similar characteristics to ID speech:
    Higher in pitch
    Greater fluctuation in pitch
    Slower tempo
    Longer pauses

    Also seems to be universal (mothers, fathers,
    young siblings all sing this way to infants) - though
    fathers don't do it as often and don't raise their pitch as much as mothers do.
  8. IN AMPLITUDE: When sound waves pass from air to liquid medium there is a loss of strength of vibrations, this occurs because the sound wave reaching the fetus are lower in intensity than they were originally - they've been attenuated.
  9. Perception of accents in rhythm ARE POSSIBLE FOR INFANTS. Infants bounced every 2 beats preferred rhythm with auditory accent every two beats. Infants bounced every 3 beats preferred rhythm with auditory accent every three beats.Infants who were blindfolded when bounced, still sensed accents, but did not bounce when viewing someone else doing it. VISUAL CUES ARE NOT ENOUGH TO ALLOW INFANTS TO ENCODE RHYTHMIC ACCENTS.
  10. Look for MOTOR response:
    Startle responses, other changes in fetal movement corresponding to onset of sound.
    Originally measure through visual or tactile methods, but can now be measured through
    ultrasound. Reports of mother not generally used - mother's reports are less reliable, and mother is less sensitive to movement than newer technologies.

    Look for PHYSIOLOGICAL changes:
    Typically, changes in heart rate are observed
    Originally used stethoscope and watch, but can now use cardiotocography (electronic fetal monitor).
  11. Practical benefits of ID singing:
    Increases attention (just like ID speech)
    Reduces body movement (making feeding and diaper changes easier)
    Calms infant, reduces crying, and brings about sleep more easily
  12. Rauscher et al were cautious in drawing any conclusions, media got results and concluded that listening to Mozart highers the infants IQ. Did not mention that this was not true most of the time and it did not last long at all. Explanations in findings were ignored. The media GREATLY overextended the original findings. The popular idea of the "Mozart Effect" has not been supported.
  13. Decasper and prescott: 2-day old newborns who have been exposed to father's voice for 4-10 hours still don't show preference for father's voice (DeCasper & Prescott, 1984)
  14. fetuses are most likely responding to large scale differences between different music selection, NOT preferentially responding to particular STYLES of music
  15. Increases attention (just like ID speech)
    Reduces body movement (making feeding and diaper changes easier)
    Calms infant, reduces crying, and brings about sleep more easily
  16. However, infants usually cannot discriminate between two melodies with same contour, even if there are 3 or more different intervals between melodies. Suggests that melodic contour and relative intervals between pitches of melody seem to be much more important than the absolute pitches of the melody.
  17. 3 and 4-month olds had responses similar to adults, but 2-month olds were very different.
    3 and 4-month olds had a "mismatch negativity" (MMN) response 200ms after onset of oddball tone, followed by a positivity around 300ms. Infants at 2-months did not.
    Explanation: There is a developmental transition somewhere between 2 and 4-months of age in the way pitches are processed in the brain.
    Possible explanation: progressive myelination occurs in infants' brain. The slow-wave response of 2 month old may change to fast adult-like response as the process of myelination takes place.
  18. The popular notion that there are lasting benefits of playing classical music to newborns and infants. Despite the popularity of this notion, it has NOT been shown scientifically.
  19. INTERNAL sounds - mother's breathing, heartbeat, digestion
    EXTERNAL sounds - conversations, doors closing, traffic, music, etc
  20. Querleu et al (1988)
    Participants asked to recognize various phonemes (vowels and consonants) from intra-uterine recordings
    Both male and female voices clearly heard, though voices lost "crispness," making many phonemes (especially consonants, which contain higher frequencies than vowels) unrecognizable.
    Participants recognized 30% of phonemes, and only 22% of the consonants
    Most of the time it is not clearly heard
  21. ID speech seems to serve several important roles in infant development:
    Communicates and regulates emotion
    Facilitates language acquisition (helps segmenting and recognizing words)

    Research suggests that infants really do prefer this type of speech: They pay attention longer to people using ID speech.
  22. Chang and Trehub
    Suggests infants don't pay attention to actual pitches, but instead to contour of melody, and most infants can detect difference between two melodies that differ in only one pitch, if it changes the contour.
  23. Studies of fetal responses to music consistently show changes in motor response and heart rate when exposed to various classical music pieces
  24. Airborne technique: Sounds created at some distance from the mother, Sound waves travel through air to reach mother (and fetus!), Typically, sound created with loud speakers within a few feet of mother

    Air-Coupled technique: Stimulation applied directly to mother's abdomen through speaker, Speaker usually isolated from mother's abdomen by foam/rubber ring, Advantage over airborne is that it transmits sound more directly to mother and minimizes sound pressure loss

    Vibroacoustic technique: Device like tuning fork or voice simulator (electronic larynx) transmits vibrations directly to the mother's abdomen. Designed to propagate sound pressure more efficiently through tissue and fluids
  25. Both infants and adults can distinguish between real ID singing in the presence of an infant compared to simulated ID singing where there is actually not an infant present.
  26. Chang and Trehub:
    This is decrease in response to a stimulus after
    repeated presentations. We can use it with infant research on melody perception: When researchers played scrambled version of original melody, infants' heart rate decreased (i.e. this is a new melody!). When researchers played an exact transposition of original melody, infant's heart rate did not decrease (i.e. nothing new here!)
  27. Newborns prefer music they were exposed to during prenatal development. Newborns became more alert with decreased heart rate and movement when hearing the theme song of a TV show their mother watched every day during her pregnancy.
  28. More recent measurements using hydrophones (microphones specialized for recording under water) suggest intrauterine sounds range between 28 - 65 dB, and not the original estimate of 90dB
  29. ID singing is even more compelling to infants than is ID speech (Nakata & Trehub, 2004) - 6-month old infants prefer videos of mom engaged in ID singing over ID speech
  30. Phillips-Silver & Trainor
    During presentation of unaccented rhythm, researcher bounced child on either every second beat or every third beat - allowing child to "feel" accent. They are important, let the infant know the cues to pick up the accents
  31. Studies performing intra-uterine recordings of orchestral music. Attenuation of higher frequencies made music sound more muffled and less bright or brilliant than original recording. However, for music played at normal listening volumes, rhythm and basic timbre come through and tunes are generally easy to identify.
  32. FREQUENCY: LOW frequency sounds below about 300 Hz will have little or no attenuation (little or no loss of sound energy)
    HIGH frequency sounds have much more attenuation and are much less likely to make it to fetus with enough energy to be heard over internal noise
  33. DeCasper and Spence(1986): newborns can recognize some acoustic characteristics of speech that they heard during end of pregnancy, and preferred the story compared to others
  34. However, infants' ability to localize sounds not as good as adults. One possibility is that their small heads make interaural timing and intensity differences hard to detect. Their head also doesn't make much of a "sound shadow" that reduces intensity of sound wave at far ear. They also spend a lot of time on their backs - our head and ears work best at sound localization when we are STANDING.
  35. Infants process rhythms similar to how they process melody - they recognize a particular rhythm as being the same even when the tempo changes. Recognizing a particular rhythm doesn't rely on the absolute TIME between the rhythmic elements, but instead on the relative timing between elements.
    Played classical/pop songs to mother via headphones
    Fetuses showed increase in motor activity and decrease in respiratory movements when mother listened to 25 minutes of classical or pop music (compared to control
    group with no music). Effects were stronger for genre of music that mother reported she preferred.

    Zimmer: the mother's liking of a particular genre may affect her physical state (e.g. state of relaxation) and this may be causing the fetus's response
    Kessen: Taught infants to sing pitches and judged their pitch accuracy. On averge infants were on the same pitch 70% of the time and when they DID miss, it was because they just hadn't transitioned to the next pitch yet - they were still singing the previous pitch.
  38. Fetuses respond with faster movements to more stimulating music and with slower movement to more sedate music.
    However, the likely explanation is that the fetus is simply responding to very broad acoustical differences between music (e.g. loudness, tempo) and NOT responding to different "styles" of music.
  39. Fetuses exposed mostly to low frequencies (due to attenuation characteristics of mother's body)
    Newborns are better at discriminating high frequencies. Olsho (1984)
    5 month old infants better at discriminating sounds over 4000 Hz than adults, but are WORSE than adults for lower frequencies (2000 Hz and below).
  40. Despite surprising conclusion that the experimental group preferred the NOVEL pieces to the familiar, it is still clear that the infants remembered the pieces.
  41. characteristics of speech like tempo, rhythm, pitch, and stress.
  42. newborns are COMFORTED by sounds of heartbeat of about 72 bpm because it is a familiar sound from the womb.
    Salk: Newborns who heard heartbeat for 4 days after birth cried less and were likely to gain weight than newborns in control group. However studies did find like other tools such as the metronome gave the sma result as the sound of the heartbeat. One possibility is that rhythmic sounds at that tempo just happen to be comforting to a newborn. Another possibility is that fetal exposure to resting heartbeat made them relaxed during prenatal development, and this relaxation has now generalized to other slow rhythmic sounds as well.
  43. Studies have found that fetuses start to RESPOND TO SOUND AROUND 6TH MONTH of development (start of third trimester)
  44. Chang and Trehub
    When first hearing melody, heart rate decreases (i.e. something new!)
    As melody repeatedly played, they habituate (heart rate returns to normal).