3
MECHANISMS OF MUSICAL
MEMORY IN INFANCY
.
Abstract
How do infants learn about their auditory world, and what do they remember? In this chapter, we
review recent findings suggesting that as previously observed in the language domain, infants possess
powerful memory abilities that allow them to represent myriad aspects of their musical environ-
ments. These memories provide a corpus of musical experiences from which infants can begin to
acquire the structures that characterize their native musical systems.
Introduction
From the perspective of an infant just beginning to make sense of the world, music is an
extremely complex and attractive stimulus. Not only is music itself of great interest to the
youngest listeners, but it is also the case that the musical aspects of language—the pitch and
rhythmic patterns that constitute native language prosodic structure—are the most likely
to capture infants’ attention, and are the first components of language that infants learn
(e.g. Refs 1–3). Moreover, infant-directed music may be more speech-like, with more com-
municative value, than adult-directed music, suggesting that the input to infant listeners
may be particularly similar in these two domains (e.g. Ref. 4 and Chapter 1). Linguistic and
musical input both present a vast array of information to listeners—including many levels
of structure that are simultaneously available—that must be acquired by infants on
the road to becoming native listeners. How does this process unfold, and what are the
mechanisms that allow infants to learn from their musical experiences?
While we will focus primarily on music in this chapter, we will use the literature on
infant speech and language perception to suggest avenues of overlap and difference, and as
a source of potentially fruitful areas for future study. Before doing so, however, it is neces-
sary to step back and consider the hypothesized relationships between these two systems.
In particular, the connection between linguistic and musical processes in infancy is cur-
rently unknown. Language and music are clearly not isomorphic in the adult brain, and
are dissociable in many important ways (for recent reviews, see Chapters 12 and 13).
Despite these differences in the mature state, it is possible that some of the same mecha-
nisms are engaged in learning in both domains. It is important to note that any observed
modularity in the adult brain does not necessarily mean that the learning mechanisms
which initially supported learning during infancy are themselves modular. While there
is some evidence that some specifically musical processes are subject to congenital
impairments,^8 it is also the case that some learning mechanisms have been shown to