The development of language and music processing begins in the fetal period. For example, newborns recognize and prefer speech and melodies spoken or sang by their mother during pregnancy. These perceptions are based on the infants’ ability to organize and discriminate auditory information on the basis of prosodic cues such as pitch, rhythm, timbre, intonation, and pauses. Similarities and differences in these cues help infants group the sound stream into musical and linguistic units, e.g., words, and set boundaries between them. More generally, infants use prosodic information to infer word and syllable boundaries, as well as phrase and sentence structures (“prosodic bootstrapping”). By four months of age, for instance, infants prefer melodies and spoken language with pauses between phrases rather than within phrases.
Infants show a preference for “infant-directed speech”, which is slow, rhythmic, and high pitched, and contains long pauses and exaggerated
intonation. Similarly, “infant-directed singing” also attracts infants’ attention. It is characterized by specific manifestations of prosodic cues
such as long inter-phrase pauses, high pitch, and exaggerated rhythm. From that, it has been suggested that one function of both infant-directed speech and singing is to support language acquisition by highlighting the relevant elements in language such as word and phrase boundaries.
The idea that singing and music foster language acquisition through prosodic cues is corroborated by the findings of common and shared neurophysiological structures. It appears that, at least in early development, rather than being separate phenomena, language is a kind of music. Meanwhile, many studies provide evidence for broad transfer effects of music on language competencies in children and adults. Unfortunately, investigations with infants are rare and only recently started to address the impact of music on language learning early in life.
Prosody links music and language development in infancy
Michael Kavšek, Katarina Kompan Erzar
