SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 19 -- Many adults lament their inability to carry a song or play a musical instrument in tune. What they may not realize is that they were probably born with perfect pitch, or the ability to identify a note on a musical scale without a single reference point. Researchers at the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented new evidence Monday that suggests infants are born with an exceptional talent for distinguishing sounds and language structure.
Although infants appear to have the ability to recognize perfect pitch at 8 months of age, they lose this talent some time before they reach adulthood, said Jenny Saffran, director of the Infant Learning Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Saffran's study tested adults and infants on their ability to identify perfect pitch and relative pitch, which involves tracking intervals between notes. The adults were unable to identify the absolute pitch whereas the infants excelled at this task but struggled with the relative pitch tests.
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Scientists are not yet sure why or when infants lose their sense of perfect pitch but Saffran suggests that the skill disappears with age because it is under-used.
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"We are born with this innate machinery but it goes away because it's not very useful," said Saffran. Absolute pitch is too refined a tool to be relevant for day-to-day applications. Humans generally respond to sounds within a limited frequency band and therefore the ability to process the finer, detailed sound information is unnecessary, argues Saffran. An exception to this theory may be found in adults who speak tonal languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Vietnamese where the tone and pitch of a word defines its meaning.
There is some evidence to support the theory that parents should enroll their children in music classes as early on as possible. Many studies indicate that adults who learned to play an instrument at a very young age were able to retain absolute pitch later in life.
Another exercise which may benefit early childhood development is talking to babies in simple, isolated words. Michael Brent, associate professor of computer science at Washington University, has found that before the age of 15 months, the words children tend to learn are those that a parent says in fragments, outside of a sentence structure.
The findings suggest that parents' instinct to disregard grammar and sentence structure when they speak to babies may actually be helping them learn.
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