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Baby's Got Rhythm -- Really

Posted on: Saturday, 20 August 2005, 10:10 CDT

Infants pick up on new beats better than adults, studies show

HealthDay News -- "Shake it, baby" just took on a whole new meaning: Two studies find infants latch on to unfamiliar musical rhythms better than their parents do.

Research involving six-month-olds found they were able to recognize these novel beats much easier than adults.

The studies found the babies were able to detect subtle variations in the complex rhythm patterns of Balkan folkdance music just as easily as adult Bulgarian and Macedonian immigrants in the United States. And the babies were far more capable than Western adults at tuning into those grooves.

However, "by the time babies are 12 months old, they much more closely resemble adults who are more sensitive to rhythms in their own culture's music than to rhythms in a foreign musical culture," researcher Erin Hannon of Cornell University said in a prepared statement.

She said it's likely that an infant's developmental path for learning musical rhythm is similar to that used in language and speech

. At an early stage, an infant's brain is more flexible than an adult's in its ability to process different word sounds and patterns from a variety of speakers. This also appears to be true when it comes to categorizing different kinds of musical structures, she said.

"But it isn't long before [infants] settle on those that are most common and meaningful to their cultures," Hannon said.

"We actually shape and tune our perceptual processes in a manner that is specific to the music of our culture. We showed that young infants, who have much less experience listening to music, lack these perceptual biases and thus respond to rhythmic structures that are both familiar and foreign," Hannon said.

"Although we know that young infants perceive speech in a manner that is language-general, our findings are unique and important in suggesting that the same is true for perception of musical rhythms," she said.

The studies were published in the journals Psychological Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More information

Cornell University

The American Academy of Pediatrics outlines infant developmental milestones at 12 months (www.medem.com ).

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