Discrimination of prosody and music by normal children

Prosody or the melody of speech is the process used to alter the meaning (l inguistic prosody) or emotional force (affective prosody) of a sentence. Th e components of prosody are rhythm, pitch, tone and stress and they are art iculated by modulation of the acoustic correlates of prosody; frequency, du ration and amplitude. Little is known about the development of prosody in n ormal children other than that it appears to be a precursor to the further acquisition of normal language. In order to examine the development of the perception of prosody in normal children, a group of 40 neurologically norm al children aged between 5 and 9 years were subjected to a number of prosod ic recognition tasks. The objective,vas to modify a number of existing task s and to devise a number of new ones to test both linguistic and affective prosody and the appreciation of affective cues in music. The results indica te a step-wise improvement in perceptual contours up to 8.5 years old. Howe ver the perception of emotion in music appears highly developed early on in development. This study provides normative data and is the first report of a comparison between the development of prosodic and musical appreciation in this age group of normal children, Eur J Neurol 6:221-226 (C) 1999 Lippi ncott Williams & Wilkins.