Aural perception training full#

Cumulative visual fixation and initial fixation on the mother’s image lasted longer for maternal singing than for maternal speech.

For instance, Nakata and Trehub (2004) studied six-month-old infants who were presented with extended audio-visual recordings of their mother’s infant-directed speech or singing. Both are therefore able to support mother- infant communication and language development while newborns are at a relatively early stage of neurological development (Bouissac, 2004). Motherese and singing have simple melodic arches which are cognitively easier to process than words. It has been proposed that singing develops directly out of motherese ( infant-directed speech consisting of exaggerations, elevated pitch, slow repetitions and melodic elaborations of ordinary vocal communication Dissanayake, 2004 Falk, 2004 Mahdhaoui et al., 2009 Saint-Georges et al., 2013). The newborn can process emotional information and speech sounds which form the basis of the child’s development in relation to social tasks and native language (Huotilainen, 2010).Įarly interactions between adults and infants include the use of infant-directed forms of language and music which are preferred by infants Trainor (1996 1989) refers to this infant-directed speech as a type of musical speech, while Koelsc and Masataka (1999) and Fernand and Siebel (2005) suggest that the early developing brain processes language as a type of music. During the later weeks of pregnancy and the first months of life, the cognitive capabilities related to the recognition of emotion and language acquisition develop rapidly.

Some have proposed that this early recognition of music and speech has evolved as a cross-cultural adaptation to support mother- infant interactions (Huron, 2001 Tarr et al., 2014 Freeman, 2000 Fritz et al., 2009 Gregory and Varney, 1996).Īdvances in technology-for instance, magnetoencephalography-have been used to record foetal and neonatal cognitive functions by non-invasively recording the magnetic fields produced by active neurons in the brain. The impact of prenatal auditory experience can be observed among newborns when infants show a strong preference for their mother’s voice over the voice of another female (DeCasper and Fifer, 1980 Cooper and Aslin, 1989), their mother’s language over a foreign language (Moon et al., 1993 2012), and specific passages of speech (DeCasper and Spence, 1986) or music (Hepper, 1991) which were presented to them during the final weeks of pregnancy. Foetuses also respond differently to music and speech (Kisilevsky et al., 2004 Granier-Deferre et al., 2011).

At this point, the foetus can discriminate the speech of their mother from that of a stranger, and the speech of their native language from a non-native language (Kisilevsky et al., 2003 Kisilevsky and Hains, 2009). Learning the melodies, timbres and rhythms of the music and language of an individual’s culture begins in the mother’s womb during the third trimester of development. The foetus in the womb can respond to sound as early as 19 weeks into pregnancy (Moon and Fifer, 2000 Graven and Browne, 2016).

Aural perception training full#

The environment is full of events where it is necessary to segregate sounds into streams where several sound sources are present at the same time (Bregman, 1994) and it is necessary to differentiate between those which are relevant and those which are irrelevant.īeing able to process sound has high survival value, and hearing is the first sense to develop. In everyday life, we utilise complex linguistic systems to process sound in the environment (Kraus and Slater, 2016). Language and music are unique human forms of communication.