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Developmental Science 13:3 (2010), pp 545–551

DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2009.00912.x

PAPER Effects of Kindermusik training on infants’ rhythmic enculturation
David W. Gerry, Ashley L. Faux and Laurel J. Trainor
Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, McMaster University, Canada

Abstract
Phillips-Silver and Trainor (2005) demonstrated a link between movement and the metricalinterpretation of rhythm patterns in 7-month-old infants. Infants bounced on every second beat of a rhythmic pattern with no auditory accents later preferred to listen to an accented version of the pattern with accents every second beat (duple or march meter), whereas infants bounced on every third beat of the same rhythmic pattern preferred to listen to a version with accents every third beat(triple or waltz meter). The present study compared infants participating in Kindermusik classes with infants not participating in music classes. In Kindermusik classes infants receive enriched experience moving to music. Following Western musical norms, the majority of the music samples in the classes are in duple meter. During the preference test, Kindermusik infants listened longer overall,indicating heightened interest in musical rhythms. Both groups listened longer to the accented version that matched how they had been bounced, but only the Kindermusik group showed a stronger preference in the case of duple bouncing than in the case of triple bouncing. We conclude that musical classes for infants can accelerate the development of culture-specific metrical perception.

IntroductionIn many domains infants are initially open to a wide variety of perceptual organizations, but through exposure to the forms of a particular culture, their perceptual organization narrows to become specialized for the forms of their culture. We refer to this process as enculturation. For example, young infants readily discriminate phonemes from categories found in any language, but before the end ofthe first year preferentially process the categories of the language of their culture (Werker & Tees, 2005). In the visual domain, face processing becomes better for human over animal faces, and for faces of one’s own race over foreign faces (Pascalis, de Haan & Nelson, 2002; Kelly, Quinn, Slater, Lee, Ge & Pascalis, 2008). In the musical domain, some aspects of infants’ early perception arequite sophisticated (Trehub & Hannon, 2006). Infants, like adults, prefer consonant intervals over dissonant intervals (Trainor & Heinmiller, 1998; Trainor, Tsang & Cheung, 2002), remember simple melodies over days or weeks (Saffran, Loman & Robertson, 2000; Plantinga & Trainor, 2005), discriminate rhythm patterns (Demany, McKenzie & Vurpillot, 1977), recognize rhythmic patterns across variation intempo (Trehub & Thorpe, 1989; Baruch & Drake, 1997), distinguish metrical structures (Hannon & Trehub, 2005a), and extract the meter of ambiguous rhythms through the

integration of movement and auditory information (Phillips-Silver & Trainor, 2005). On the other hand, it takes considerable exposure to a musical system before enculturation occurs to the pitch structure of its scales and harmony(Trainor, 2005; Trainor & Trehub, 1992, 1994). In the present paper we investigate enculturation in rhythmic acquisition, asking whether enriched multisensory experience with Western music and movement, as found in Kindermusik training, accelerates infants’ bias for preferential processing of common rhythms in Western music. Rhythm has two components: the rhythm pattern itself, that is, the sequenceof sound events and silences, and the metrical structure, or underlying beat (Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983; London, 2004). Metrical structure is not directly present in the stimulus, but is extracted perceptually from the rhythm pattern. Metrical structure is hierarchically organized, with accented beats typically occurring at regular intervals. For example, at one level of the hierarchy every...