Culture-general and culture-specific factors in the discrimination of melodies

We examined effects of a culture-general factor, pattern redundancy (number of repeated tones), on the discrimination of 5-tone melodies that differed in their adherence to Western tonal conventions. Experiment I evaluated th e ability of 9-month-old infants to differentiate "standard" melodies from subtly altered "comparison" melodies. Greater redundancy of the standard me lodies was associated with enhanced infant performance, but musical convent ionality had no effect. Experiment 2 evaluated comparable abilities in 5-ye ar-old children and musically untrained adults. Children's performance was enhanced by the redundancy of standard melodies, but the effect was greater in conventional than in unconventional contexts. The redundancy of standar d melodies facilitated adults' performance in conventional but not in uncon ventional contexts. Thus, increasing musical exposure seems to attenuate th e effects of culture-general factors such as pattern redundancy while ampli fying the influence of culture-specific factors, (C) 1999 Academic Press.