Children learn the structure of the music of their culture similarly to how they learn the language to which they are exposed in their daily environment. Furthermore, as with language, children acquire this musical knowledge without formal instruction. Two critical aspects of musical pitch structure in Western tonal music are key membership (understanding which notes belong in a key and which d...

Children aged 3 years and 4½ years old watched a puppet, struggling to achieve goals, who was helped by a 2nd puppet and violently hindered by a 3rd. The children then distributed wooden biscuits between the helper and hinderer. In Experiment 1, when distributing a small odd number of biscuits, 4½-year-olds (N = 16) almost always gave more to the helper. Children verbally justified their unequa...

PURPOSE This study was aimed at determining the role of prosody and situational context in children's understanding of expressive utterances. Which one of these 2 cues will help children grasp the speaker's intention? Do children exhibit a "contextual bias" whereby they ignore prosody, such as the "lexical bias" found in other studies (M. Friend & J. Bryant, 2000)? METHOD In the first experim...

this article addresses the perceptual correlates of compensatory lengthening in persian. in a perception experiment, duration, spectral tilt measurements h1-h2 and h1-f1 and f0 were varied in several steps based on the results from a production experiment (sadeghi, 2007). subjects were asked to identify the tokens involving vowel length. results revealed that duration is the most reliable perce...

Our folk psychology includes intuitions about free will; we believe that our intentional acts are choices and that, when such actions are not constrained, we are free to act otherwise. In a series of five experiments, we ask children about their own and others' freedom of choice and about the physical and mental circumstances that place limitations on that freedom. We begin with three experimen...

Although infants say "no" early, older children have difficulty understanding its truth-functional meaning. Two experiments investigate whether this difficulty stems from the infelicity of negative sentences out of the blue. In Experiment 1, given supportive discourse, 3-year-olds (N = 16) understood both affirmative and negative sentences. However, with sentence types randomized, 2-year-olds (...

Six-year-old children can judge a speaker's feelings either from content or paralanguage but have difficulty switching the basis of their judgments when these cues conflict. This inflexibility may relate to a lexical bias in 6-year-olds' judgments. Two experiments tested this claim. In Experiment 1, 6-year-olds (n = 40) were as inflexible when switching from paralanguage to content as when swit...

We examined effects of age and culture on children's memory for the pitch level of familiar music. Canadian 9- and 10-year-olds distinguished the original pitch level of familiar television theme songs from foils that were pitch-shifted by one semitone, whereas 5- to 8-year-olds failed to do so (Experiment 1). In contrast, Japanese 5- and 6-year-olds distinguished the pitch-shifted foils from t...