33operate equivalently for both speech-like and music-like stimuli in both infancy and
adulthood.^9 Similarly, related patterns of adult brain electrical activity occur in response to
some aspects of music and language, but not to others (for review, see Chapter 18). The
level of plasticity evident for both types of auditory learning, particularly during child-
hood, suggests that at least some of the underlying processes for music and language may
overlap developmentally.
Consider a specific example of the possible relationship between representations of
auditory information in memory with respect to speech and music. The relevance of pitch
for music perception is obvious; what is less obvious but also important is the role played
by pitch in language learning. The most easily observed use of linguistic pitch lies in the
melodic contours which signal sentence meaning, such as the rising contour that is indic-
ative of question prosody. There are also many languages which use pitch and/or pitch con-
tour contrastively with respect to word meaning; these tonal languages, such as Mandarin,
Thai, and Vietnamese, are acquired readily by infants and young children. For this learning
to occur, all infants—regardless of their native language-to-be—must possess the capacity
to attend to pitch cues as a possible component of lexical items. At the same time, many
aspects of pitch in linguistic stimuli must be ignored by infants engaged in learning their
native language. As in music perception, the absolute pitches with which words are spoken
are not informative as to their meaning. Even deeper relationships between the use of pitch
in speech and music processing have been hypothesized; for example, processing speech
may lead the auditory system to acquire the specific pitch relationships between harmon-
ics in speech sounds, which become the intervals in music.^11 It is thus likely that the learn-
ing mechanisms that subserve the acquisition both speech and music are related to one
another in some fashion, despite the eventual deep differences in the knowledge acquired;
however, the nature of this relationship is currently unknown.
Infant music perception and possible relationships with
speech perception
The task of learning about how music works appears to be partially solved for the infant
quite early in life, either via biological predispositions or through extremely rapid learning.
Infants show early preferences for consonant musical intervals such as octaves and perfect
fifths, are highly attuned to rhythm, can represent both relational and absolute pitch informa-
tion under different circumstances, and are sensitive to cues correlated with musical phrase
boundaries (for a recent review, see Chapter 1). These early emerging capacities provide
support for the infant’s initial representations of musical structure and events.
Despite this early head-start, there remains a tremendous amount of information for
infants to learn. Just as in language, where learners must acquire knowledge of the system-
atic structure in their native language (e.g. phonological and grammatical generalizations)
as well as specific knowledge about individual experiences (e.g. individual phonemes,
lexical items, and voices), infants must learn the structure of the musical system present in
their environment (e.g. tonality, conventional structures) as well as specific pieces of music.
Infants must therefore possess abilities which allow them to represent musical experiences,
and to learn from those experiences.