35demonstrated that the degree to which novel melodies adhere to Western tonal conventions
affected the performance of 5-year-old children, but not 9-month-old infants. These find-
ings diverge from the literature on infant speech perception, which suggests that infants
have acquired the bulk of their native language’s sound structure by the time they are a year
of age (for extensive review, see Ref. 29). It is possible that the acquisition of Western tonal
structure is more akin to the acquisition of syntax and morphology than to the acquisition
of phonology, as the grammatical aspects of language are acquired slightly later (primarily
in the second and third postnatal year). Alternatively, the fact that infants presumably receive
more exposure to speech than to music (although this has never been quantified) may
account for the relative rapidity with which knowledge of the native language emerges
relative to knowledge of the native musical system.
Infants’ memory capacity for specific musical experiences—individual pieces of music
present in the infant’s environment—has received far less attention in the literature. In the
remainder of this chapter, we will review recent evidence suggesting that infants possess the
capacity to remember individual pieces of music over multiweek delays. These accumu-
lated memory representations presumably provide a corpus of musical knowledge from
which infants can learn about the structure of their native musical system, analogous to the
specific linguistic experiences from which infants begin to glean phonological and gram-
matical generalizations. As described above with reference to adult musical memory and
infant linguistic memory, infants appear to attend to many levels of musical structure
which are manifest in their memory representations, suggesting interesting parallels in
memory both across age (infants vs adults) and domain (music vs language).
Long-term memory for music in infancy
To what extent do young infants maintain specific musical experiences in long-term mem-
ory? Recent findings in the language domain suggest that 8-month-old infants can remem-
ber words from stories over time delays of two weeks.^17 Because music, along with
language, is among the most complex auditory learning tasks facing infants, it is possible
that infant memory for musical stimuli is equally powerful. Little research, however, has
addressed the question of whether infants remember particular musical pieces heard dur-
ing passive listening experiences.
To ask whether infants possess long-term memory for musical materials, we adapted the
experimental procedures used by Jusczyk and Hohne^17 to assess the maintenance of lin-
guistic materials over multiweek delays.^30 We exposed a group of 7-month-old infants to a
10 min. recording of two Mozart piano sonata movements: KV 281 in B-flat major,
Andante, and KV 282 in E-flat major, Adagio. Each infant listened to the music once a day,
at home, for 14 consecutive days. Following a two week retention interval, during which the
infants did not hear these pieces, we assessed the infants’ long-term memory for the Mozart
sonatas in the laboratory. To do so, we measured listening preferences using the head-turn
preference procedure (e.g. Ref. 31), a standard computer-automated method used in stud-
ies of infant auditory perception.
We hypothesized that if infants remembered the music with which they were familiar-
ized at home, they would show recognition by listening longer to passages of familiar music