Developmental Origins of Domain-Specificity in Auditory Cognition

University Of Nevada Las Vegas, Las Vegas NV

Investigators

Abstract

Even before they are born, human infants are typically exposed to a wide range of rich and complex sound structures, including both speech and music. Much evidence suggests that very young infants learn from their early sound experiences. Infants exhibit preferences for particular types of speech and particular types of music. This program of research will explore the extent to which language and music learning are driven by common mental mechanisms and developmental processes, and, conversely, the extent to which specific, separate systems are used for each. Although music and speech contain many overlapping features, they also possess fundamentally distinct structures that require domain-specific cognitive and perceptual processes. Infants must nevertheless acquire perceptual knowledge about each domain through exposure to a rich and complex mixture of musical and linguistic input. A fundamental question is the extent to which infants overcome this challenge through music- and speech-specific processing mechanisms, or through domain-general learning processes and prolonged exposure to patterned sound. This project examines whether or not adults rely on music- and speech-specific biases when attempting to learn patterns from unfamiliar sound sequences, and it examines whether or not such biases develop or remain stable from infancy to adulthood. Tasks are expected to yield contrasting outcomes depending upon whether participants use domain-general or domain-specific strategies and should therefore yield important insights about the developmental trajectory and origins of domain-specific processes and representations in auditory cognition. The proposed studies tackle fundamental questions about the relative contributions of innate, modular adaptations and acquired expertise, and they will add to our understanding of the nature of mechanisms that support learning during early development. Although a great deal is known about how infants acquire knowledge of language, much less is known about acquisition of musical knowledge even though both types of knowledge are acquired during a comparable developmental time frame and may interact. Understanding how musical experiences influence language and other non-musical domains may help advance knowledge in applied and educational fields, where music training and engagement with music are increasingly shown to have wide-ranging mental health and cognitive benefits within and outside the classroom, and for therapies that use music to facilitate language rehabilitation.