Children's Linguistic Difficulties in a Pitch Directionality Task Involving Cross‐modal Stimuli

Abstract

Many children perform poorly on traditional tests of pitch discrimination which require them to identify the higher or lower of successive notes. It is proposed that linguistic ambiguity, inherent in the application of spatial terms to auditory domains, contributes to these difficulties. An experiment is reported which compares children's (aged 6 to 11 years) and adults’ recognition of pitch directions in conditions where consonant or dissonant visual cues are presented, with a condition in which only the sounds are presented. Younger children perform best when visual and auditory directions are consonant. Older children show evidence of superior performance in both visual conditions in comparison with peers tested in the audio‐only condition, suggesting that materials making the linguistic ambiguity salient may help promote their awareness of the auditory dimension. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for interventions to facilitate early musical education.