Newborn infants process pitch intervals.
OBJECTIVE
We investigated whether the auditory system of newborn babies extracts the constancy of a pitch interval from exemplars varying in absolute pitch.


METHODS
Event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded from healthy newborn infants in an oddball paradigm consisting of frequent standard and infrequent deviant tone pairs. Tone pairs varied in absolute frequency. Standard and deviant pairs differed in the amount of pitch difference within the pairs, but not in the direction of pitch change.


RESULTS
Deviant tone pairs elicited a discriminative ERP response.


CONCLUSIONS
This result suggests that the neonate auditory system represents pitch intervals similarly to adults.


CONCLUSIONS
Adult-like processing of pitch intervals allows newborn infants to learn music, speech prosody, and to process various important auditory cues based on spectral acoustic features.
Stefanics
Gábor
G
Institute for Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 398, Szondi u. 83-85, H-1394 Budapest, Hungary.
Háden
Gábor P
GP
Sziller
István
I
Balázs
László
L
Beke
Anna
A
Winkler
István
I
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010898:Pitch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D011571:Psychoacoustics