Infant Vocal Imitation of Music

Abstract

Infant vocal production has been studied mainly from the perspective of language development. We studied it from the perspective of singing development by analyzing a 15-month-old’s imitations of songs. The infant wore a recording device that yielded a continuous, 16-hr audio recording of all the sounds produced by him and around him throughout the day. We listened to the audio file and identified instances in which his unprompted vocalizations resembled songs he had heard earlier. One imitation was recognized by his father, who then sang the song himself and engaged in imitative turn taking with the infant; the other imitation went unnoticed by his parents. Perceptual and acoustic analyses of the imitations and the song models showed that the infant imitated critical music features of the songs, including pitches, intervals, and rhythms. We discuss the use of new technologies for the study of singing development in infancy; such technologies facilitate the collection of spontaneous vocalizations that may go unnoticed by parents and make it possible to trace connections between music environment opportunities and specific singing outcomes in infants.