Songs convey emotion by means of expressive performance cues (e.g. pitch level, tempo, vocal tone) and lyrics. Although children can interpret both types of cues, it is unclear whether they would focus on performance cues or salient verbal cues when judging the feelings of a singer. To investigate this question, we had 5- to 10-year-old children…

The ability of 5-month-old infants to process relational information was assessed by means of a habituation-dishabituation paradigm with cardiac deceleration as the response measure. (SB)

Four groups of infants, 4 1/2 to 5 1/2 months of age, were presented with repeated speech stimuli which were synthesized exemplars of the sound, "baba," natural exemplars of "baba" or "kaba," or novel syllables on each trial. (RH)

We evaluated 6- and 7-month-olds' preference and memory for expressive recordings of sung lullabies. In Experiment 1, both age groups preferred lower-pitched to higher-pitched renditions of unfamiliar lullabies. In Experiment 2, infants were tested after 2 weeks of daily exposure to a lullaby at one pitch level. Seven-month-olds listened…

Three investigations are reported which indicate that infants between 4 and 17 weeks of age are able to detect some differences in sounds upon which phonemic contrasts are based. (Authors)

Localization responses to octave-band noises with center frequencies at 200, 400, 1000, 2000, 4000, and 10,000 Hz were obtained from infants 6, 12, and 18 months old in order to investigate infants' auditory sensitivity. (MP)

Assessed the ability of 5-month-old infants to discriminate between auditory tone patterns differing in temporal arrangement but utilizing the same component tones. Heart rate change provided the measure of pattern discrimination. (JMB)

Infants 5-17 weeks of age were presented with foreign sounds which were contingent upon their nonnutritive sucking. Significant differences were found for experimental versus control (no sound change) subjects. It was found that adults achieved perfect accuracy with English contrasts but readily confused the foreign contrasts. (Author/SB)

A modification of the observer-based psychoacoustic procedure was used to estimate the detectability of auditory signals by infants. Data from infants up to 3.5 months of age revealed improvement in performance as a function of increasing signal intensity and age. (BC)