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Categorisation of musical structures
by 6- to 10-month-old infants Marc Mélen et Julie Wachsman Université de Liège, Belgique Early development of visual categorisation processes has received extensive attention. musical categorisation, instead, has been barely studied. This paper reports a study concerning musical categorisation by 6-to-10 month old infants, using conditioned head-turning procedure. In the first experiment, infants were first taught to discriminate two referent structures - A and B - that came from a same piece of music. The sequence A was presented repetitively and when the infant was attentive, according to specific criterions, it was replaced the other sequence. A head-rotation in response to the sequence B was reinforced by an extact of a cartoon. As soon as the discrimination was installed, variants of tje parent-structures were presented. Infants were expected to teirn their head for the variants of B, but not for the variants of A. The sults obtained were consistent wih the categorisation hypothesis, however they did not reach statistical significance. The second experiment was identical to the first one, however, the parent-structures were taken from two distinct pieces, in order to increase the contrast between the elements of both distinct caztegories and to make categorisation easier. The data confirmed this hypothesis. This study will be of interest for specialists of categorisation processes and for specialists in psychology of music. In this context, indeed, categorisation processes appears crucial for the perception of musical form. Keywords: infant, conditioned head-turning procedure, categorisation, musical form. |
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