Development of neural discrimination of pitch across speech and music in the first year of life, a mismatch response study

Abstract

This study focuses on the development of neural discrimination of pitch changes in speech and music by English-language adults and 4-, 8- and 12-month-old infants. Speech stimuli were Mandarin Chinese rising and dipping lexical tones and the musical stimuli were three-note melodies with pitch levels based on those of the lexical tones. Mismatch responses were elicited using a non-attentive oddball paradigm. Adults showed mismatch negativity (MMN) responses in both the lexical tone and music conditions. For infants, for the lexical tones, a positive-mismatch response (p-MMR) was observed at 4, 8, and 12 months, whereas for the musical tones, a p-MMR was found for the 4-month-olds, an MMN for the 12-month-olds, and no mismatch response, either positive or negative, for the 8-month-olds. No evidence of cross-domain correlation of the mismatch responses was found. These results suggest domain-specific development of mismatch responses to pitch change in the first year of life.