Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The sound of timbre reigns: Auditory sequence discrimination in 3–5-year-old children

The sound of timbre reigns: Auditory sequence discrimination in 3–5-year-old children How do young children apprehend the sounds in their environments? The current study elucidates a recent finding that 3–5-year-olds have greater sensitivity to timbre – non-pitch-related spectral and dynamic attributes that differentiate sounds – than to pitch contour. This finding is somewhat surprising given that pitch contour underlies much of linguistic prosody and music recognition. Further, it represents a gap in scientific knowledge about nonspeech auditory perception, which is commonly linked to, and used to remediate, speech perception. Two hypotheses are explored: the temporal order hypothesis (that pitch contour discrimination is more difficult because it requires encoding the order of pitches, while timbre discrimination does not); the perceptual distance hypothesis (that previously tested timbres were more auditorily distant to children than pitches were, and thus that greater perceptual distance even within a dimension should lead to better discrimination). Three same-different discrimination experiments with 3–5-year-old children suggested that temporal order variation makes timbre change detection harder, but does not affect pitch change detection, and that more-distant pitch changes are better detected (CG vs. GC is easier than CD vs. DC), with hints at such an effect for timbre. Findings raise the possibility of a trade-off such that auditory perceptual distance aids detection only up to a point, past which sounds cohere less well, impeding apprehension of temporal order. Implications for auditory and spoken language development are discussed. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Auditory Perception & Cognition Taylor & Francis

The sound of timbre reigns: Auditory sequence discrimination in 3–5-year-old children

Creel, Sarah C.
Auditory Perception & Cognition , Volume 6 (3-4): 29 – Oct 2, 2023
Download PDF
29 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/taylor-francis/the-sound-of-timbre-reigns-auditory-sequence-discrimination-in-3-5-rZqIFf8MD1

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
ISSN
2574-2450
eISSN
2574-2442
DOI
10.1080/25742442.2023.2202580
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

How do young children apprehend the sounds in their environments? The current study elucidates a recent finding that 3–5-year-olds have greater sensitivity to timbre – non-pitch-related spectral and dynamic attributes that differentiate sounds – than to pitch contour. This finding is somewhat surprising given that pitch contour underlies much of linguistic prosody and music recognition. Further, it represents a gap in scientific knowledge about nonspeech auditory perception, which is commonly linked to, and used to remediate, speech perception. Two hypotheses are explored: the temporal order hypothesis (that pitch contour discrimination is more difficult because it requires encoding the order of pitches, while timbre discrimination does not); the perceptual distance hypothesis (that previously tested timbres were more auditorily distant to children than pitches were, and thus that greater perceptual distance even within a dimension should lead to better discrimination). Three same-different discrimination experiments with 3–5-year-old children suggested that temporal order variation makes timbre change detection harder, but does not affect pitch change detection, and that more-distant pitch changes are better detected (CG vs. GC is easier than CD vs. DC), with hints at such an effect for timbre. Findings raise the possibility of a trade-off such that auditory perceptual distance aids detection only up to a point, past which sounds cohere less well, impeding apprehension of temporal order. Implications for auditory and spoken language development are discussed.

Journal

Auditory Perception & Cognition – Taylor & Francis

Published: Oct 2, 2023

Keywords: Pitch contour; timbre; auditory perception; music perception; perceptual development

There are no references for this article.