Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
Dev Sci. 2018 Mar;21(2). doi: 10.1111/desc.12542. Epub 2017 Feb 22.
Five-month-old infants selectively attend to novel people who sing melodies originally learned from a parent, but not melodies learned from a musical toy or from an unfamiliar singing adult, suggesting that music conveys social information to infant listeners. Here, we test this interpretation further in older infants with a more direct measure of social preferences. We randomly assigned 64 11-month-old infants to 1-2 weeks' exposure to one of two novel play songs that a parent either sang or produced by activating a recording inside a toy. Infants then viewed videos of two new people, each singing one song. When the people, now silent, each presented the infant with an object, infants in both conditions preferentially chose the object endorsed by the singer of the familiar song. Nevertheless, infants' visual attention to that object was predicted by the degree of song exposure only for infants who learned from the singing of a parent. Eleven-month-olds thus garner social information from songs, whether learned from singing people or from social play with musical toys, but parental singing has distinctive effects on infants' responses to new singers. Both findings support the hypothesis that infants endow music with social meaning. These findings raise questions concerning the types of music and behavioral contexts that elicit infants' social responses to those who share music with them, and they support suggestions concerning the psychological functions of music both in contemporary environments and in the environments in which humans evolved.
五个月大的婴儿会选择性地关注新的唱歌者，这些唱歌者唱的旋律是他们从父母那里学来的，而不是从音乐玩具或陌生的成人唱歌者那里学来的，这表明音乐向婴儿听众传达了社会信息。在这里，我们通过更直接的社会偏好测量方法，进一步测试了年龄较大的婴儿的这种解释。我们随机将 64 名 11 个月大的婴儿分配到 1-2 周的时间内接触两种新的游戏歌曲中的一种，这些歌曲由父母唱歌或通过激活玩具中的录音来播放。然后，婴儿观看了两个新的人的视频，每个人都唱了一首歌。当这些人现在不唱歌时，每个人都给婴儿一个物体，在熟悉歌曲的歌唱者唱歌的情况下，婴儿更喜欢选择熟悉歌曲的歌唱者所展示的物体。然而，只有那些从父母的歌唱中学习歌曲的婴儿，他们对该物体的视觉注意力才会受到歌曲接触程度的预测。因此，11 个月大的婴儿会从歌曲中获取社会信息，无论是从人的歌唱中还是从与音乐玩具的社交游戏中，但父母的歌唱对婴儿对新歌手的反应有独特的影响。这两个发现都支持了这样一种假设，即婴儿赋予音乐以社会意义。这些发现提出了一些问题，即哪些类型的音乐和行为背景会引起婴儿对与他们分享音乐的人的社会反应，这些发现也支持了关于音乐在当代环境和人类进化环境中的心理功能的一些建议。
