4-month-olds Discover Algebraic Patterns in Music That 7

The recent language acquisition literature has revealed powerful, domain-general learning mechanisms that rely on frequency and distributional properties of the input. A second set of research investigates generalization of learned patterns to new input. The relationship between these two bodies is not entirely clear. The present paper demonstrates that the latter mechanism appears to be domain-general as well, although, in the domain of musical chord sequences, there is a decrease in sensitivity to algebraic patterns between 4 months of age and 7.5 months of age. We show that 4-month-old infants can discriminate three-chord patterns based on their AAB or ABA structure after being exposed to a set of patterns representing one of the structures. By 7.5 months, however, infants do not seem to make the discrimination, probably due to their experience with musical sequences, in which repetition plays less of a role than tonal structure.