JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY 40, 279-292 (1985)

Children’s Perception of Melodies: The Role of Contour, Frequency, and Rate of Presentation

BARBARA A. MORRONGIELLO, SANDRA E. TREHUB, LEIGH A. THORPE, AND SANDRA CAP~DILUPO

University of Toronto

Children 4 to 6 years of age were exposed to repetitions of a six-tone melody, then tested for their detection of transformations that either preserved or changed the contour of the standard melody. Discrimination performance was examined as a function of (1) contour condition, (2) magnitude of contour change, (3) rate of presentation, and (4) the presence of novel frequencies. Performance was superior for transformations that changed contour compared to those that did not, for greater changes in contour, and for faster presentation rates. Melodies transformed by a reordering of component tones were no less discriminable than those transformed by the addition of novel frequencies. 0 1985 Academic PKSS, IK.

In the natural environment the perception of running speech and music represents a formidable pattern perception task. The listener must extract meaning from a lengthy sequence of rapidly changing elements that are distributed in time. The ability to organize such elements into larger units or sound patterns is of obvious benefit for speech and music perception. Several recent studies have provided interesting developmental perspectives on the perception of speech patterns (Broen, Strange, Doyle, & Heller, 1983; Bull & Eilers, 1984; Bull, Eilers, & Oller, 1984; Eilers, Bull, & Oller, 1983; Morrongiello, Robson, Best, & Clifton, 1984; Strange & Broen, 1981), but there is little systematic research regarding children’s perception of musical patterns.

Music represents a highly structured auditory stimulus that can be organized by listeners along several dimensions. At the level of local features involving frequency is information about the absolute frequencies in the musical sequence. A more general level of representation involves

This research was supported by grants awarded to Sandra E. Trehub from Health and Welfare Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the University of Toronto. The authors thank Donna Laxdal and Paula Olko for their assistance in data collection and K. J. Kim for his invaluable technical assistance. Requests for reprints should be sent to Sandra E. Trehub, Centre for Research in Human Development, Erindale College, University of Toronto, Mississauga, Ontario, L5L lC6, Canada.

279 0022~0965185 $3.00

Copyright 0 1985 by Academic Press. Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

280 MORRONGIELLO ET AL.

information about the ratios of adjacent frequencies, otherwise known as interval information. Another relational but less precise dimension includes global feature information about the pattern of directional changes in frequency, also known as the melodic contour. In the temporal domain, there are corresponding distinctions between note durations, temporal interval durations, and rhythmic patterns. Thus, the multidimensional nature and hierarchical structure of musical sequences provide interesting possibilities for the study of children’s organization of complex auditory information.

The perception of familiar and unfamiliar melodies has been investigated extensively in adults (for reviews see Deutsch, 1982; Dowling, 1982; Pick, 1979). It is clear that adults identify familiar melodies on the basis of precise relational information about frequency intervals rather than absolute information about the frequencies of individual notes (Attneave & Olson, 1971; Bartlett & Dowling, 1980). In contrast, adults’ perception of unfamiliar melodies is based primarily on less precise information about the direction of successive frequency changes or the melodic contour (Dowling, 1978). Thus, changes in interval size that preserve the contour are readily detected in the case of familiar melodies but may not be detected in the case of unfamiliar melodies.

The developmental picture is less clear. Infants have been shown to detect changes that alter the contour of a melody but not those that preserve it (Chang & Trehub, 1977). Furthermore, infants’ discrimination performance varies as a function of task demands. With a minimally demanding task, they can detect interval changes, even when the contour is unchanged. With a more demanding task, they have difficulty detecting such interval changes without corresponding changes in contour (Trehub, Bull, & Thorpe, 1984).

Research with young children suggests that these aspects of melody perception may appear much later. For example, Wohlwill (1971) reported that first graders were unable to detect contour changes in a melody. In contrast, research on melody production has shown that children 4 and 5 years of age preserve contour but not intervals in their renditions of familiar songs (Davidson, McKemon, & Gardner, 1981; McKernon, 1979; Teplov, 1966). Bartlett and Dowling (1980, Experiment 4) did not test children on contour changes but did test their identification of familiar melodies under two other types of transformations: transpositions, which preserved the intervals and contour but changed the absolute frequencies, and contour preservations, which preserved the contour but changed the absolute frequencies and intervals. Only the third-grade children showed clear evidence of differentiating the two transformations.

The aim of the present research was to examine children’s perception of melodic information in unfamiliar melodies. We sought to determine whether manipulations of task difficulty would involve the differential

CHILDREN’S PERCEPTION OF MELODIES 281

use of frequency, interval, and contour information by young listeners. In two experiments, children were tested for their detection of two types of transformations of a six-tone melody: contour-preserving transfor- mations, which introduced a change in absolute frequencies and intervals but maintained the overall contour, and contour-violating transformations, which introduced changes in interval and contour with either novel or familiar (reordered) absolute frequencies. The sequence selected as the standard melody had been used previously in research with adults (Massaro, Kallman, & Kelly, 1980) and with infants (Trehub et al., 1984). Children were tested with a modification of the conditioning procedure used by Trehub et al. (1984) with infants. This modification involved discrete trials, each of which had several repetitions of a melody followed by an altered melody (experimental trial) or by the same melody (control trial).

To manipulate task difficulty, children were tested with different rates of stimulus presentation. In the visual realm, encoding is slower at younger ages (Gummerman & Roberts, 1972; Lasky & Spiro, 1980; Welsandt, Zupnick, & Meyer, 1973; Wickens, 1974) such that long exposure times and relatively slow rates of presentation are required for encoding the details of a stimulus. At short exposure times and rapid rates of presentation, infants and children encode only very general information about the stimulus. When perceiving melodies, however, it is necessary to abstract relations between successive notes in order to perceive the melodic pattern. Thus, slowing the rate of stimulus presentation is likely to involve some trade-off between greater ease of encoding the frequencies of in- dividual elements of the pattern and greater difficulty in encoding frequency relations between elements of the pattern, thereby causing the melody to lose coherence. Such modality-specific effects of presentation rate have been shown by Mackworth (1964), who found that adult’s performance on a recall task was enhanced by decreases in visual presentation rate but by increases in auditory presentation rate.

EXPERIMENT 1

The objective of the present experiment was fourfold. First, we sought to evaluate the role of contour in children’s detection of melodic changes. On the basis of previous findings with infants (Trehub et al., 1984) and children (Bartlett & Dowling, 1980, Experiment 4), we expected children’s performance to be superior for contour-violating compared to contour- preserving transformations. Second, we attempted to determine whether the magnitude of contour change influenced the detectability of trans- formations. Third, we sought to specify the contribution of novel fre- quencies to the perception of contour-violating transformations. On the basis of Dowling & Goedecke’s (cited in Dowling, 1982) findings with first-grade children, we expected changes of contour to be detected more readily when these changes involved new frequencies rather than a reor-

282 MORRONGIELLO ET AL.

dering of previously heard frequencies. Finally, we evaluated the effect of two rates of presentation on children’s detection of all of the afore- mentioned transformations.

Method

Subjects. Thirty-five children were tested. The data from 3 children were excluded because of failure to meet a training criterion (n = 2) or to complete a test session (n = 1). The final sample consisted of 32 children (21 males, 11 females) 4.1 to 5.5 years of age (mean = 4.6 years, SD = 0.5 years). According to parental report, all children were free of colds and ear infections on the day of testing.

Stimuli. All stimulus sequences are presented in musical notation in Fig. 1 and in terms of their component frequencies in Table 1. Each sequence consisted of six sinusoidal tones, with each tone shaped to have a rise and decay time of 30 ms. All transformations retained the initial and final tones of the standard sequence. Two transformations of the standard melody were formed by reordering the frequencies of the remaining tones. These contour-violating transformations altered the di- rection of frequency change for all five intervals in one case and for only two intervals, in the other. Two additional transformations were formed by substituting novel frequencies for the four internal tones of the standard. This resulted in a contour-violating transformation that altered the direction of frequency change for all five intervals and a contour-preserving trans- formation that altered the size of some intervals but left the overall contour unchanged.

The tone sequences were presented at two rates, with rate of presentation computed as the reciprocal of the onset delay between successive elements. For the slow condition, tones and intertone intervals were 200 ms in duration, which resulted in each sequence having an overall duration of 2.2 s, or a rate of approximately 2.5 tones/s. For the fast condition,

Standard (tar all cond,tlons ) :

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EXPERIMENT 1 EXPERIMENT 2

Reordered NOWI

Traming: Trammg. Tramng:

Contour Vtolatmg: Contour Violatmg: Contour Violatmg:

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Contour Vlolatmg: Contour Preserving: contour Preserving:

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FIG. 1. Representation of the stimulus sequences in musical notation.

TABL

E 1

STIM

ULUS

SE

QUEN

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USED

IN

EX

PERI

MEN

TS

1 AN

D 2

Freq

uenc

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Expe

rimen

t C

ondi

tion

Mel

ody

(Hz)

M

usica

l no

tes”

C

onto

ur

b G

P

1 Re

orde

red

Stan

dard

26

2 24

7 22

0 33

0 29

4 26

2 C

, B,

4

E,

D,

G

--+--

frequ

enci

es

8 Tr

aini

ng

262

277

330

208

233

262

C,D

.)E,A

jBtC

z

++-+

+ uj

C

onto

ur

viol

atin

g 26

2 29

4 33

0 22

0 24

7 26

2 C

, D

a E,

A,

&

C:

++-+

+ C

onto

ur

viol

atin

g 26

2 22

0 24

7 29

4 33

0 26

2 C

, &

Bj

D4

E, C

, -+

++-

%

E

Nov

el

Stan

dard

26

2 24

7 22

0 33

0 29

4 26

2 G

B,

A,

E, D

, G

--+

-- fre

quen

cies

Tr

aini

ng

262

294

330

220

247

262

++-+

+ i

Con

tour

vi

olat

ing

262

277

330

208

233

262

>;t2

tbgB

@

++-+

+ Z

Con

tour

pr

eser

ving

26

2 23

3 20

8 3 1

1 27

7 26

2 C

:B;A

bE;D

;d

4 --+

-- 8

2 St

anda

rd

262

247

220

330

294

262

G

B, A

, E,

Da

G

--+--

i5

Trai

ning

26

2 29

4 33

0 22

0 24

7 26

2 G

D

, E,

A,

B,

C,

++--+

+ C

onto

ur

viol

atin

g 26

2 22

0 24

7 29

4 33

0 26

2 -+

++-

k

Con

tour

pr

eser

ving

26

2 23

3 20

8 3 1

1 27

7 26

2 --+

-- E

* Th

e su

bscr

ipts

re

fer

to t

he o

ctav

e fro

m

which

th

e no

te

is d

rawn

. C

, is

mid

dle

C;

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e G

, is

the

G a

bove

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iddl

e C

’

A m

inus

sig

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desc

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asc

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inte

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.

284 MORRONGIELLO ET AL.

tones and intertone intervals were 110 ms, which resulted in a sequence duration of 1.2 s, or a rate of roughly 4.5 tones/s. Intersequence intervals were 800 ms for both presentation rates. The stimuli were presented at a comfortable listening level. The average sound pressure level at the approximate location of the child’s head was 75 dB-C (70 dB-A). The ambient noise level at that location measured 45 dB-C (20 dB-A).

Apparatus. The tones were generated by a synthesizer/function generator (Hewlett-Packard, 3325A), and presented via one channel of a stereo amplifier (Marantz, 1010) over a single loudspeaker (Radio Shack, Nova 6). The loudspeaker was positioned on top of a four-chamber, smoked Plexiglas box containing four different mechanical toys that could be activated independently to reinforce correct responses. Intensity of the stimulus was controlled by the function generator and calibrated with an impulse precision sound-level meter (Bruel & Kjaer, 2204). The ex- periment was controlled by a microcomputer (Commodore PET 2001), which operated the equipment through a custom-built interface. Testing was carried out inside a single-walled, sound-attenuating chamber (Industrial Acoustics Co.). The experimenter initiated trials and recorded responses by means of a small button box that was interfaced to the computer.

Design and procedure. Each child was randomly assigned to receive either two transformations with reordered frequencies or two transfor- mations with novel frequencies. Each child participated in two test sessions, one at each presentation rate, separated by a brief rest period. The order of presentation rates was counterbalanced over subjects for pairs of transformations.

Throughout a session the child sat across from the experimenter with the loudspeaker and toy box to his or her right at an angle of 45”. Trials were initiated by the experimenter when the child indicated readiness to listen. Each trial consisted of three, four, or five repetitions of the standard melody followed by another repetition of the standard melody (control trial) or by a transformed melody (experimental trial). The number of such repetitions was randomized across trials with the constraint that there was an equal number of trials at each repetition value. Correct responses, consisting of hand clapping to the presentation of a transformed melody, resulted in the illumination and activation of a mechanical toy for 4 s. Responses on control trials were designated as incorrect and were recorded but not reinforced. The child was allowed 3.8 s, beginning at melody onset, in which to respond on all trials at both presentation rates.

Each session consisted of a training phase followed by a testing phase. During training, the child was presented with experimental (change) trials only. The transformed melody used for training consisted of a six-tone sequence that differed in contour from the standard and differed in com- ponent tones from the test transformations (see Table 1). Up to six

CHILDREN’S PERCEPTION OF MELODIES 285

demonstration trials were presented initially to show the child the ap- propriate response. During these trials, the contrasting melody was pre- sented at an intensity 5 dB higher than the standard. On the first trial, the child was instructed to listen carefully to each melody. If the child did not spontaneously report that the last melody in the series was different, then the experimenter pointed this out to the child. On the second trial, the experimenter demonstrated the correct response when the contrasting melody was presented (i.e., clapping hands). This was followed by up to four practice trials on which the experimenter helped the child to respond appropriately; the experimenter ceased to help when the child appeared to have learned the response. After this, the child was required to meet a training criterion of four consecutive correct responses: two with the transformed melody presented with the 5-dB increment, followed by two with the transformed melody at the same intensity level as the standard. Testing was discontinued if the child failed to meet this criteria within 20 trials, excluding the demonstration trials.

During the testing phase, the standard melody remained the same as in training, but the following changes were made: (1) control (no-change) trials were introduced and (2) the experimenter wore headphones carrying music, which served to mask the nature of the trials. The children were cautioned that no-change trials were included, and they were directed to respond only when they heard a changed melody. In each test session, the children received a randomized presentation of 15 trials: 5 control trials and 5 experimental trials with each of the two test transformations.

Results

Correct responses for each transformation and rate were converted to proportion scores, which are shown in Fig. 2. Parametric statistics were

Rate of Presentation (tones per set)

FIG. 2. Proportion correct responses to each type of transformation for the novel frequencies group and the reordered frequencies group in Experiment 1 as a function of rate of presentation.

286 MORRONGIELLO ET AL.

performed on the data (see Myers, DiCecco, White, & Borden, 1982, for discussion of the use of parametric statistics with categorical data and repeated measurements). A repeated-measures analysis of variance with rate (2 levels) and test melody (4) as within-subject factors was performed separately on the two pairs of transformations. Control trials were excluded from the analyses since subjects responded on only 4% of these trials across conditions, and correlated c tests (one tailed) revealed that subjects had reliably performed all discriminations (p < .005 in each case).

In general, children’s performance was significantly better at the faster rate of presentation, F(1, 15) = 8.00, p < .025, for transformations with reordered frequencies, and F( 1, 15) = 29.4, p < .OOl, for transformations with novel frequencies. Across presentation rates, children performed better for the contour-violating transformation with five rather than two intervals changed in the case of reordered frequencies, F(1, 15) = 4.70, p < .05, and also for the contour-violating compared to contour-preserving transformations with novel frequencies, F(1, 15) = 4.60, p < .05. De- creasing the rate of presentation produced a comparable decrement in correct responding for both contour-violating transformations with reor- dered frequencies, as can be seen in Fig. 2. In contrast, the decrement in performance for the slower rate of presentation was significantly greater for the contour-preserving (29%) compared to contour-violating (20%) transformations with novel frequencies, F(1, 15) = 6.13, p < .05.

To determine if there were differences in responding as a function of novel versus familiar frequencies at either rate of presentation, a two- factor (rate, frequency condition) analysis of variance with repeated mea- surements on rate of presentation was performed on the contour-violating transformations in which frequencies differed. There was no effect of frequency composition on performance at either rate. There was, however, a main effect of rate, reflecting enhanced performance at the faster rate for both frequency conditions, F(1. 30) = 36.82, p < .OOl.

In summary, children discriminated all transformations from the standard melody. Performance was superior for contour-violating relative to contour- preserving transformations, for transformations that altered the direction of pitch change for five rather than two intervals, and for the presentation rate of 4.5 tones/s compared to 2.5 tones/s. Moreover, decreasing the presentation rate led to greater performance decrement in the case of contour-preserving compared to contour-violating transformations. In contrast, the presence of novel or familiar frequencies did not exert differential effects on the detection of contour-violating transformations.

EXPERIMENT 2

Decreases in the rate of presentation were associated with greater performance decrement for melodies that preserved the contour compared

CHILDREN’S PERCEPTION OF MELODIES 287

to those that altered it. The aim of the present experiment was to replicate and extend these effects by presenting children with contour-preserving and contour-violating transformations at four presentation rates: 2.0, 2.5, 3.5, and 5.0 tones/s. In order to facilitate comparisons with the previous results, we used two sequences from Experiment 1: the contour-violating transformation with two changed intervals that resulted from a reordering of familiar frequencies and the contour-preserving transformation with novel frequencies.

Method

Subjects. Twenty-three children were tested. The data from 3 children were excluded because of equipment problems (n = 1) or failure to complete a test session (n = 2). The final sample consisted of 20 children (11 males, 9 females) 4.2 to 5.7 years of age (mean = 5.2 years, SD = 0.5 years). According to parental report, all children were free of colds and ear infections on the day of testing.

Stimuli. The six-tone standard sequence was the same as that in Ex- periment 1. This sequence was paired with two transformations used previously: (1) a contour-violating transformation, which reordered the frequencies of the standard sequence so that the direction of pitch change was altered for two intervals, and (2) a contour-preserving transformation, which added novel frequencies such that intervals were changed but the overall contour was retained (see Table 1). The sequences were presented at four presentation rates: (1) 5.0 tones/s, in which tones and intertone intervals were 100 ms; (2) 3.5 tones/s, in which tones and intertone inter- vals were 145 ms; (3) 2.5 tones/s, in which tones and intertone intervals were 200 ms; and (4) 2.0 tones/s, in which tones and intertone intervals were 245 ms. Intersequence intervals were 800 ms for all presentation rates. Sound pressure levels of stimuli and ambient noise were the same as those reported in Experiment 1.

Apparatus. The apparatus was identical to that described for Experi- ment 1.

Procedure. Each child visited the laboratory twice and was tested on two presentation rates at each visit. Typically, a child’s second visit was scheduled for 2 to 4 weeks from the date of the first visit. At each visit, the child participated in two test sessions separated by a brief rest period, each session involving a different presentation rate. Thus, each child was tested on all four presentation rates over the course of the two visits. The order of presentation rates was counterbalanced over subjects by means of a Latin-square design. Each session consisted of a randomized presentation of 15 trials: 5 control trials, 5 contour-violating transformations, and 5 contour-preserving transformations. The training and testing pro- cedures were otherwise identical to those described for Experiment 1.

288 MORRONGIELLO ET AL.

Results

Correct responses for each transformation and rate were converted to proportion scores, which are shown in Fig. 3. A repeated-measures analysis of variance with rate (4) and transformation (2) as within-subject factors was performed on the proportion scores. Control trials were excluded from the analysis because children responded on only 2.5% of these trials, and correlated t tests (one tailed) indicated that the children dis- criminated both transformations from the standard melody (p < .005).

As can be seen in Fig. 3, performance was superior for the contour- violating transformation compared to the contour-preserving transfor- mation. This observation is supported by a main effect of transformation, F( 1, 19) = 16.11, p < .OOl . Performance varied as a function of presentation rate, F(3, 57) = 26.77, p < .OOl, with a decline in performance associated with slower rates of stimulus presentation. As in Experiment 1, the magnitude of these effects varied with transformation, F(3, 57) = 24.03, p < .OOl. Correlated t tests (two tailed) contrasting the proportion of correct responses for contour-preserving and contour-violating transfor- mations at each presentation rate revealed significantly greater responding to contour-violating than to contour-preserving transformations for rates of 3.5 tones/s, t(19) = 2.94, p < .Ol, 2.5 tones/s, t(19) = 3.77,~ -=c .Ol, and 2.0 tones/s, t(19) = 3.86, p < .Ol. At the fastest presentation rate, 5.0 tones/s, performance on the two transformations approached ceiling (90-95%) and there was no significant difference between contour conditions.

To evaluate changes in performance as a function of rate of presentation, correlated t tests (two tailed) were performed. For both transformations, there was a significant decrement in performance when the presentation rate decreased from 3.5 tones/s to 2.5 tones/s, t(19) = 3.04, p < .Ol, for contour-violating transformations, and t(19) = 3.20, p < .Ol for

Rate of Presentation (tones per set)

FIG. 3. Proportion correct responses to each type of transformation in Experiment 2 as a function of rate of presentation.

CHILDREN’S PERCEPTION OF MELODIES 289

contour-preserving transformations, and from 2.5 tones/s to 2.0 tones/s, t(19) = 2.50, p < .05; t(19) = 2.26, p < .05, respectively. Figure 3 reveals that performance was best at the fastest presentation rate, 5.0 tones/s, but this did not differ significantly from performance at the presentation rate of 3.5 tones/s.

In summary, children discriminated all transformations from the standard melody. As in Experiment 1, performance was superior for contour- violating compared to contour-preserving transformations and for more rapid rates of presentation.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

The present research indicates that, by 44 to 5 years of age, children encode information about melodic contour and frequency from unfamiliar melodies. They detect contour-violating transformations that introduce changes in frequencies, intervals, and contour. They also detect contour- preserving transformations that involve changes in frequencies and intervals but not contour. Children’s discrimination of these transformations indicates that there is considerable concordance between their perception and production skills. Our findings suggest that the relatively poor performance shown by young children in earlier studies of melody perception (e.g., Bartlett & Dowling, 1980; Wohlwill, 1971) can be ascribed to methodological as opposed to perceptual factors. It is likely that the present use of multiple repetitions of the standard melody compared to a single pre- sentation in other research (e.g., Bartlett & Dowling 1980; Dowling & Goedecke, in Dowling 1982) is at least partially responsible for the per- formance differences. Nevertheless, the precise relation between repetition and performance remains to be determined. It is also likely that the use of reinforcement in the present study and its absence in other studies account for some of the observed differences in performance.

Children’s superior performance on contour-violating compared to con- tour-preserving transformations illustrates the importance of contour in the discriminability of unfamiliar melodies. Moreover, the cue of contour change did not appear to operate in an all-or-none fashion: greater degrees of contour change (five versus two intervals) were associated with greater discriminability. The absence of difference between children’s detection of contour-violating transformations with reordered frequencies compared to those with novel frequencies is in marked contrast with the reports of Dowling and Goedecke (in Dowling, 1982) on somewhat older children. Nevertheless, the present pattern of findings adds further credence to the notion that contour rather than frequency provides the critical dis- criminative cue.

Although children differentiated between contour-preserving transfor- mations and the standard melody, there is no basis for determining whether this was cued by the presence of new frequencies or by the altered

290 MORRONGIELLO ET AL.

relations between frequencies (i.e., intervals). The critical test would require a comparison of performance on transpositions (frequencies changed, intervals preserved) and contour-preserving transformations (frequencies and intervals changed), From previous research, it appears that infants respond at comparable levels to both transformations (Trehub et al., 1984). Although infants also fail to distinguish transpositions and contour-preserving transformations from the standard melody under some conditions, they can nevertheless make these distinctions when the in- terpattern interval is 800 ms, as in the present study (Trehub et al., 1984). Adults, on the other hand, can detect contour-preserving transformations when these begin on the same frequency as the original melody, as in the present study, but not when they begin on a different frequency (Dowling, 1978; Dowling & Fujitani, 1971). In line with Dowling and Fujitani’s (1971) conclusions, the most parsimonious interpretation of the present findings is that children’s detection of contour-preserving trans- formations is based on the change in specific frequencies. A conclusive test of this interpretation would require a comparison of performance on transpositions and contour-preserving transformations in which both begin on a novel frequency.

Children’s discrimination performance varied also as a function of presentation rate. Reduction in the rate of stimulus presentation resulted in a significant decrement in performance on contour-violating and contour- preserving transformations, but the latter were more adversely affected. The particular susceptibility of contour-preserving transformations to disruption in performance parallels the performance decrement observed with infants with a different manipulation of task difficulty (Trehub et al., 1984). The relative robustness of performance on contour-violating transformations across manipulations of task difficulty highlights further the critical role of contour in children’s perception of melodies.

Finally, it should be noted that the study of melody perception in children goes well beyond the domain of music, providing important insights into children’s perceptual organization of complex auditory in- formation. What we have learned, among other things, is that, with limited exposure to sequences of specific tones, children nevertheless create global representations about contour from local information about frequencies. Further, global features play a more primary role than local features in children’s recognition of melodies. Thus, in distinguishing melodies, contour takes precedence over absolute frequencies. Such a perceptual strategy would allow children to recognize songs played or sung in different keys (i.e., different absolute frequencies, same intervals and contour). Further, this precedence of global, relational information over local detail has important perceptual parallels in speech perception, such as the identity of words produced by different speakers. Certainly, the ability of children to organize sound sequences into patterns and to

CHILDREN’S PERCEPTION OF MELODIES 291

ignore variation in local information facilitates their perception of both speech and music in the natural environment.

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RECEIVED: June 14, 1984; REVISED: October 16, 1984.