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Abstract:
Numerous studies investigated physiological correlates of
the processing of musical information in adults. How these
correlates develop during childhood is poorly understood. In
the present study, we measured event-related electric brain
potentials elicited in 5- and 9-year-old children while they
listened to (major – minor tonal) music. Stimuli were chord
sequences, infrequently containing harmonically inappropri-
ate chords. Our results demonstrate that the degree of
(in)appropriateness of the chords modified the brain
responses in both groups according to music-theoretical
principles. This suggests that already 5-year-old children
process music according to a well-established cognitive
representation of the major – minor tonal system and accord-
ing to music-syntactic regularities. Moreover, we show that, in
contrast to adults, an early negative brain response was left
predominant in boys, whereas it was bilateral in girls,
indicating a gender difference in children processing music,
and revealing that children process music with a hemispheric
weighting different from that of adults. Because children
process, in contrast to adults, music in the same hemispheres
as they process language, results indicate that children
process music and language more similarly than adults. This
finding might support the notion of a common origin of
music and language in the human brain, and concurs with
findings that demonstrate the importance of musical features
of speech for the acquisition of language.
