Summary

An adult listening attentively to a piece of music and understanding it performs an enormous amount of information processing very rapidly. Most of this processing is carried out automatically below the level of conscious analysis, because there is no time for reflective thought on each detail as the piece steadily progresses. This process is closely parallel to what happens when a native speaker of a language listens to and understands a sentence. The elements of the sentence are processed very rapidly—so rapidly that the listener cannot attend individually to each detail, but simply hears and understands the overall meaning. The rapidity of automatic speech processing depends on extensive perceptual learning with the language in question. Similarly, the music listener's facility in grasping a piece of music depends on perceptual learning gained through experience with the music of a particular culture. Further, we can see in the development of language from its earliest stages the predisposition of the child to speak, and the ways in which basic elements of language, already present in infancy, are molded through perceptual learning and acculturation into adult structures (Brown, 1973). Similarly, we can find elements of adult cognitive structures for music in young infants, and can watch them develop in complexity under the influence of culture and individual experience. In both speech and music, then, there are specific patterns of behavior that emerge in infancy that bear the unmistakable stamp of “speech” or “music” behavior. We can trace the elaboration of those incipient speech and music patterns in the course of development.