The sound of timbre reigns: Auditory sequence discrimination in 3–5-year-old children

ABSTRACT

How do young children apprehend the sounds in their environments? The current study elucidates a recent finding that 3–5-year-olds have greater sensitivity to timbre – non-pitch-related spectral and dynamic attributes that differentiate sounds – than to pitch contour. This finding is somewhat surprising given that pitch contour underlies much of linguistic prosody and music recognition. Further, it represents a gap in scientific knowledge about nonspeech auditory perception, which is commonly linked to, and used to remediate, speech perception. Two hypotheses are explored: the temporal order hypothesis (that pitch contour discrimination is more difficult because it requires encoding the order of pitches, while timbre discrimination does not); the perceptual distance hypothesis (that previously tested timbres were more auditorily distant to children than pitches were, and thus that greater perceptual distance even within a dimension should lead to better discrimination). Three same-different discrimination experiments with 3–5-year-old children suggested that temporal order variation makes timbre change detection harder, but does not affect pitch change detection, and that more-distant pitch changes are better detected (CG vs. GC is easier than CD vs. DC), with hints at such an effect for timbre. Findings raise the possibility of a trade-off such that auditory perceptual distance aids detection only up to a point, past which sounds cohere less well, impeding apprehension of temporal order. Implications for auditory and spoken language development are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Pitch contour
• timbre
• auditory perception
• music perception
• perceptual development

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Nicolle Paullada and Emilie Seubert for collecting data; and to parents, children, and schools for their participation. SCC was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (CAREER BCS-1057080 and BCS-1230003).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

Anonymous data are available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/z4pru/doi/10.17605/OSF.IO/Z4PRU

Notes

1. There are obvious exceptions to this, including timbre modulation in electronic music and, historically, klangfarbenmelodie in the music of serialist composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. In the latter case, one might wonder how well these timbre-varying melodies cohere as auditory objects.

2. It’s important to note that even a single instrument does not have uniform timbre from note to note, due to differences in register, articulation, and loudness from note to note (see McAdams, 2018, for illustrations). However, the assumption in the current work—open to falsification by later research, of course—is that the timbre similarity between notes of the same instruments here are greater than similarity between notes of different instruments.

3. Numbers here refer to pitch height relative to middle C, which is C4. Numbering increases with pitch, changing on Cs. For example, the B below middle C (C4) is B3, the C above middle C is C5, and the D above C5 is D5.

4. The numerical difference between the 7-semitone and 5-note conditions was the original impetus to test additional participants, in case power was insufficient to detect a difference. Results were unchanged in this analysis (no difference between 7-semitone and 5-note conditions) and other analyses. See Appendix B for details.

5. As this experiment had sufficient numbers of monolingual (27) and bilingual (21) children to explore possible effects, an ANOVA was run to test the effect of Language x Trial Type x Perceptual Distance. Overall, monolingual children showed larger d’ values than bilingual children, but none of the interactions with language even approached significance. Lower bilingual d’ held for the five children with exposure to a tone or pitch accent language in addition to English, unlike Creel et al. (2018). It is not clear why bilingual children might show lower scores. As it did not interact with the effects of interest, it was not pursued further.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation [BCS-1230003]; National Science Foundation [BCS-1057080]