CHILDRENS COGNITIVE REPRESENTATIONS OF MUSICAL PITCH

Several recent investigations of children's cognition of musical pitch have examined the nature of children's sensitivity to the ''tonal hie rarchy'' identified by Krumhansl (1990a). These studies presented chil dren with musical ''contexts,'' asking them to make judgments about su bsequent pitches, and have produced strikingly divergent results. Fact ors of age and of type of musical material used in context appear to p lay significant roles in determining subjects' sensitivities. This pap er describes two experiments that examine the time course of the devel opment of children's cognitive representations of pitch relations, tak ing into account the contributions made to such representations by str uctural and by temporal factors (following West & Fryer, 1990). A prob e-tone technique was used with two contrasting context types, one bein g a ''typical'' cadential sequence and the other consisting of differe nt randomizations of the diatonic collection. This experiment was cond ucted on 285 children ranging between 6 and 11 years old, from two dif ferent single-sex schools. The results were further investigated in a game-playing experiment-using chime bars-with children from each age g roup represented in the first experiment. These experiments appear to indicate that children's early representations of pitch relations are remarkably stable and that development may take the form of an increas ing sensitivity to time-dependent characteristics of the musical surfa ce leading to an internalization of the tonal hierarchy. Despite the d ifferent methodologies used here, results are broadly in line with tho se suggested by Krumhansl and Keil (1982), although children's represe ntations of musical pitch as exhibited here appear to be more sophisti cated than would be implied in that study.