Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Attention To Melodic Versus Phonetic Cues In 8-Month-Old Infants, Alexandra M. Ryken

Undergraduate Honours Theses

Infant listeners have very sophisticated auditory processing skills. In the music domain, infants as young as 6-months of age can recognize familiar and novel melodies (e.g., Trainor, Wu, & Tsang, 2004), and in the speech domain 8-month-old infants can use the statistical frequency of syllables to recognize familiar and novel nonsense words (e.g., Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). Though infants can process music and speech information when presented separately, there has been little research to date on whether infants can process information from both streams simultaneously. Auditory streams such as lullabies often contain both a melody and lyrics, but can …