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Abstract
There’s extensive research on infant’s discrimination of speaking voices but few studies have focused on infant’s discrimination of singing voices. Most investigations on infants’ perception of timbre in music have been based on instrumental sounds. We completed an experiment with 7- and 13-month-olds (n = 16 and n = 17 respectively) to answer two basic questions: Can infants discriminate melodies sung by the same woman? Can they discriminate the voices of women singing the same melody?
We found that infants did not discriminate between the voices and that only the older infants discriminated between two melodies sung by the same woman. In other words, older infants discriminated the melodies but not the voices, and younger infants discriminated neither.
The results of the present study question the assumption that infants discriminate singing voices and suggest that there may be critical differences in how infants perceive the timbre of voices in music and language contexts.
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