Takayuki Nakata

Exposure to music and cognitive performance: tests of children and adults:

This article reports on two experiments of exposure to music and cognitive performance. In Experiment 1, Canadian undergraduates performed better on an IQ subtest (Symbol Search) after listening to an up-tempo piece of music composed by Mozart in comparison to a slow piece by Albinoni. The effect was evident, however, only when the two pieces also induced reliable differences in arousal and mood. In Experiment 2, Japanese 5-year-olds drew for longer periods of time after singing or hearing familiar childrens songs than after hearing Mozart or Albinoni, and their drawings were judged by adults to be more creative, energetic, and technically proficient. These results indicate that (1) exposure to different types of music can enhance performance on a variety of cognitive tests, (2) these effects are mediated by changes in emotional state, and (3) the effects generalize across cultures and age groups.

Maternal Singing Modulates Infant Arousal

We examined the effect of maternal singing on the arousal levels of healthy, non-distressed infants. Mothers sang to their 6-month-old infants for 10 minutes, after which they continued interacting for another 10 minutes. To estimate infant arousal, we gathered saliva samples from infants immediately before the mothers began singing and 20 minutes later. Laboratory analyses of the saliva samples revealed that salivary cortisol levels converged from baseline to post-test periods. Specifically, infants with lower baseline levels exhibited modest cortisol increases in response to maternal singing; those with higher baseline levels exhibited modest reductions. This convergence of arousal levels was confirmed by reduced variability in cortisol values from baseline to post-test. These findings are consistent with the view that maternal singing modulates the arousal of prelinguistic infants.

Emotion and Music in Infancy

The infants environment is filled with musical input. Mothers’ speech to infants is music-like, exhibiting a variety of musical features that reflect its emotional expressiveness. Although this speech has similar melodic contours across cultures, which reflect comparable expressive intentions, each mother has individually distinctive interval patterns or speech tunes. Mothers also sing to infants in an emotive manner, their repeated performances being unusually stable in pitch and tempo. Infants prefer affectively positive speech to affectively neutral speech, and they prefer infant-directed performances of songs to other performances. When infants are presented with audio-visual versions of their mothers speech and singing, they exhibit more sustained interest in the singing than in the speech episodes. Finally, live maternal singing has more sustained effects on infant arousal than does live maternal speech. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest directions for future research.

Music recognition, music listening, and word recognition by deaf children with cochlear implants.

Objectives: To examine the ability of congenitally deaf children to recognize music from incidental exposure and the relations among age at implantation, music listening, and word recognition. Design: Seventeen child implant users who were 4 to 8 yr of age were tested on their recognition and liking of musical excerpts from their favorite television programs. They were also assessed on open-set recognition of three-syllable words. Their parents completed a questionnaire about the children’s musical activities. Results: Children identified the musical excerpts at better than chance levels, but only when they heard the original vocal/instrumental versions. Children’s initiation of music listening at home was associated with younger ages at implantation and higher word recognition scores. Conclusions: Child implant users enjoy music more than adult implant users. Moreover, younger age at implantation increases children’s engagement with music, which may enhance their progress in other auditory domains.

Effect of cochlear implants on children’s perception and production of speech prosody

Japanese 5- to 13-yr-olds who used cochlear implants (CIs) and a comparison group of normally hearing (NH) Japanese children were tested on their perception and production of speech prosody. For the perception task, they were required to judge whether semantically neutral utterances that were normalized for amplitude were spoken in a happy, sad, or angry manner. The performance of NH children was error-free. By contrast, child CI users performed well below ceiling but above chance levels on happy- and sad-sounding utterances but not on angry-sounding utterances. For the production task, children were required to imitate stereotyped Japanese utterances expressing disappointment and surprise as well as culturally typically representations of crow and cat sounds. NH 5- and 6-year-olds produced significantly poorer imitations than older hearing children, but age was unrelated to the imitation quality of child CI users. Overall, child CI users imitations were significantly poorer than those of NH children, but they did not differ significantly from the imitations of the youngest NH group. Moreover, there was a robust correlation between the performance of child CI users on the perception and production tasks; this implies that difficulties with prosodic perception underlie their difficulties with prosodic imitation.

Music in the Lives of Deaf Children with Cochlear Implants

Present‐day cochlear implants provide good temporal cues and coarse spectral cues. In general, these cues are adequate for perceiving speech in quiet backgrounds and for young childrens acquisition of spoken language. They are inadequate, however, for conveying the rich pitch‐patterning of music. As a result, many adults who become implant users after losing their hearing find music disappointing or unacceptable. By contrast, child implant users who were born deaf or became deaf as infants or toddlers typically find music interesting and enjoyable. They recognize popular songs that they hear regularly when the test materials match critical features of the original versions. For example, they can identify familiar songs from the original recordings with words and from versions that omit the words but preserve all other cues. They also recognize theme songs from their favorite television programs when presented in original or somewhat altered form. The motivation of children with implants for listening to music or melodious speech is evident well before they understand language. Within months after receiving their implant, they prefer singing to silence. They also prefer speech in the maternal style to typical adult speech and the sounds of their native language‐to‐be to those of a foreign language. An important task of future research is to ascertain the relative contributions of perceptual and motivational factors to the apparent differences between child and adult implant users.

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Pitch Memory.

We examined effects of age and culture on childrens memory for the pitch level of familiar music. Canadian 9- and 10-year-olds distinguished the original pitch level of familiar television theme songs from foils that were pitch-shifted by one semitone, whereas 5- to 8-year-olds failed to do so (Experiment 1). In contrast, Japanese 5- and 6-year-olds distinguished the pitch-shifted foils from the originals, performing significantly better than same-age Canadian children (Experiment 2). Moreover, Japanese 6-year-olds were more accurate than their 5-year-old counterparts. These findings challenge the prevailing view of enhanced pitch memory during early life. We consider factors that may account for Japanese childrens superior performance such as their use of a pitch accent language (Japanese) rather than a stress accent language (English) and their experience with musical pitch labels.

Music and language in deaf children with cochlear implants

Congenitally deaf children with cochlear implants successfully perceive speech in quiet environments, and many produce intelligible speech with normal voice quality. Because implants were designed to optimize speech rather than music perception, timing cues are preserved at the expense of pitch cues. Consequently, adult implant users tend to discontinue musical activities that were enjoyable prior to the onset of deafness. By contrast, congenitally deaf children enjoy a variety of musical activities including listening, singing, and playing instruments. Research in our laboratory suggests that musical activities may enhance child implant users’ speech perception skills. For example, initiation of music listening at home by children with cochlear implants predicted their success on a word recognition task. Moreover, earlier ages of implantation were positively associated with enhanced motivation for listening to music. In addition, child implant users were able to identify musical themes that accompanied t...