The overwhelming majority of studies that has revealed beneficial effects of musical experience on early cognitive and linguistic development (e.g., Barac, Moreno, Chau, Cepeda & Bialystok, 2011; Degé & Schwarzer, 2011; François et al., 2013), has focused on conventional musical training given in classrooms or, for infants, on structured musical activities given in groups such as parent-infant music classes(Gerry, Unrau, & Trainor, 2012). For most children under the age of 5 however, musical experience consists of everyday informal musical interaction in the form of singing songs with their parents, dancing, being exposed to recorded music and playing musical games (for a review see Flohr, 2005). This type of shared experience can potentially support learning in the home environment, by providing a pleasant framework in which parents engage in learning activities with their children. Indeed, studies looking at the quality of the early home learning environment have recognized the supportive role of joint musical activities in young children’s learning, and measures of shared learning activities have often included items related to music making (e.g.,Williams, Barrett, Welch, Abad, & Broughton, 2015).
With respect to the effects that the home environment can have on children’s healthy development, ample evidence indicates that the amount and quality of language input in the early years is crucial for language acquisition (Hoff, 2003; Huttenlocher, Waterfall, Vasilyeva, Vevea, & Hedges, 2010; Pan, Rowe, Singer, & Snow, 2005; Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009; Weisleder, & Fernald, 2013). A considerable body of literature has also demonstrated that the quality of the home learning environment (conceptualized as everyday interactions and shared activities between children and their caregivers) can have beneficial effects on the development of language and cognition. Enriched home learning environments provide more learning opportunities
for children via increased frequency of learning activities, such as book reading and availability of learning materials. Positive developmental outcomes of enriched home learning environments include improved language and literacy skills (Sénéchal, Pagan, Lever, & Ouellette 2011), early numeracy skills (Anders et al., 2012; Kleemans, Marieke Peeters, Segersa, & Verhoeven, 2012), higher reading scores (Baker, Cameron, Rimm-Kaufman, & Grissmer, 2012; Chazan-Cohen et al., 2009) and optimal social- emotional abilities (Chazan-Cohen et al., 2009; Hartas, 2011). The frequency of musical interactions is usually embedded within measures of the home learning environment but very little research has focused on the home musical environment separately, although a growing number of findings have recently highlighted associations between music and language development (e.g., Woodruff-Carr et al., 2014), and have reported benefits of early music lessons on auditory and language-related skills (e.g., François et al., 2013). But why would this type of experience be beneficial for early linguistic and cognitive development?
One excellent example of informal musical experience introduced early in life is infant-directed (ID- henceforth) singing. ID-singing, similarly to ID-speech (Fernald et al., 1987; 1989), can be distinguished from other types of singing mainly due to characteristics such as higher pitch, slower tempo (Trehub et al., 1997, mostly referring to lullabies), more expressive rendering of lyrics and higher emotional engagement (Trehub, Unyk, & Trainor, 1993; Trehub, Hill, & Kamenetsky, 1997). The use of singing in early mother-infant interactions appears to be ubiquitous (Trehub et al., 1993), is specifically related to phonetic features of each language (Falk, 2007, 2011a, 2011b) and is more effective than speech alone in delaying distress in 7- to 10-month- old infants (Corbeil, Trehub, & Perentz, 2015). In addition, studies have shown that maternal singing can regulate the levels of arousal in 6-month-old infants (Shenfield, Trehub, & Nakata, 2003) and infants show increased responsiveness (visual feedback) to videos of mothers singing versus speaking at 6 months, presumably because mothers’ singing performances are rated as more emotional when compared to speech (Trehub, Plantinga, & Russo, 2015). Moreover, analyses of infant and mother vocalizations have revealed that infants and mothers often co-regulate their vocal productions at the tonal level (Van Puyvelde et al., 2010) and that such incidents of tonal synchrony are associated with mother-infant physiological co-regulation as measured by heart rate variability (Van Puyvelde et al., 2014). It has therefore been hypothesized that maternal singing can function as an emotional coordinator between infants and mothers (Nakata
& Trehub, 2004) and that these early vocal interactions may play a crucial role in later social development (Van Puyvelde & Franco, 2015). Studies have also indicated that singing facilitates speech segmentation in both infants (Lebedeva & Kuhl, 2010; Thiessen & Saffran, 2009) and adults (Schön et al, 2008) highlighting its potentially beneficial role in language development. To take one example, Thiessen and Saffran (2009) familiarized infants to a series of digits that were either spoken or sung. Results showed that infants in the sung condition more readily learned the series of digits than infants in the spoken condition, suggesting that singing may serve as “scaffolding” for learning the sounds of language. Indeed, singing may support language learning through the presence of pitch variations that can aid in the discrimination of syllables (Schön et al, 2008). Another possibility is that infants benefit from the combined input, since a second source of information (music) provides additional cues to help them identify structure in the first source (words and syllables) (Thiessen & Saffran, 2009). Moreover, the emotional properties of ID singing may lead to increased interest and attention (Schön et al, 2008; Thiessen & Saffran, 2009).
Parental singing may hold a central position in early musical interactions where infants’ activities are limited, but the repertoire of musical activities becomes enriched, as the child grows older. Indeed, it has been shown that maternal singing is the principal form of musical engagement in infancy (Ilari, 2005; Shoemark & Arnup, 2014), while musical activities expand in the later years (De Vries, 2009; Mehr, 2014; Youm, 2013; Young, 2008). An elegant qualitative analysis of 18 young children’s recordings, parental diaries and interviews with caregivers, provided rich information about parent- child musical activities (Barrett, 2011), which appear to include joint and supported singing (e.g., children’s songs, counting songs, and nursery rhymes), improvising songs to accompany everyday routines, dancing, playing musical (including toy) instruments, and listening to recorded music (Barrett, 2009; 2011). Critically, the majority of studies that have explored the type and frequency of home musical interactions in the early years report that most parents of children under 6 years interact musically with their children in the home environment in various ways (Ilari, 2005; Mehr, 2014; Shoemark & Arnup, 2014; Young, 2008), while musically trained parents are more likely to sing and play music to their infants (Custodero, & Johnson-Green, 2003). Given the predominance and richness of musical activities within family environments and the spontaneous enthusiasm that the majority of young children show for musical play, it is
surprising how little we know about the effects that this dimension of parent-child interactions can have on development.
Only two studies so far have directly addressed the effect of such informal musical experience that is not limited to maternal singing: Putkinen et al.,(2013) and Williams et al., (2015). Putkinen and colleagues asked parents to report how frequently their 2- and 3-year-old children engaged in activities such as singing and dancing as well as how often they interacted musically with their children (e.g., how often they sang to their children). Higher scores in these reports were significantly associated with more refined ERP responses associated with change detection in the duration and temporal structure of sounds [mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, late discriminative negativity (LDN), and reorienting negativity (RON)]. These results suggested that children whose environment was more musically enriched had developed more mature auditory processing at the neural level. Williams and colleagues (2015) used a longitudinal design to assess the effect of enriched musical activities in the home as measured by parent self-reports when their children were 2 and 3 years old, on cognitive, emotional and social markers of development two years later. Moderate associations were found between the amount of shared musical activities at 2 and 3 years and the children’s vocabulary, arithmetic abilities, attentional and emotional regulation, and prosocial skills two years later. More interestingly these small effects were maintained even when the authors controlled for the effect of shared book reading, an activity found to be strongly associated with later academic achievements (Farrant & Zubrick, 2013; Sénéchal et al., 2011). This study is limited by the use of a single item to assess the frequency of musical interaction (“in the past week, on how many days have you, or an adult in your family, played music, sung songs, danced, or done other musical activities with the child) and a 4-point response scale ranging from 1 = “not in the past week” to 4 = “6-7 days”. Moreover, only one measure of language development was used (vocabulary), which does not allow for further exploration of the associations between home musical interaction and linguistic development.
Another longitudinal study that looked at the frequency of singing songs/rhymes and playing music at home in a sample of 15,600 3- to 5-year-old children (assessed through parental interviews) failed to report linguistic or social-emotional enhancements associated with shared musical activities (Hartas, 2011). However, in this study there
was no direct measurement of children’s socio-emotional and language and literacy development but rather results were based on teachers’ ratings.
While interest in the effects of informal musical experience on linguistic and cognitive development has recently increased, the effect of parent-child musical interactions on children’s musical abilities has been relatively neglected. Although, some studies have looked at the associations between parental attitudes towards music and children’s musical attainment and motivation in music classes (Brand, 1986; Driscoll et al., 2015; Sichivitsa, 2007), only one study has directly addressed the question of whether the amount and quality of informal musical experience can influence the development of musical abilities in children as assessed by direct measurement (Brand, 1986). In this study, a parental report for the home musical environment developed for 7-year-old children (Home Musical Environment Scale or HOMES; Brand 1985) was used to examine the relationship between parent and child musical involvement (note that this did not include parent-child musical interactions) and the children’s musical profiles. Results indicated a strong relationship between the HOMES scores and children’s musical skills as assessed by musical discrimination tasks and teacher ratings, while the strongest predictor of musical achievement was parental attitudes towards music and parent-child musical involvement (Brand, 1986). With regards to whether informal musical experience could affect musical attributes at an earlier age, the Putkinen et al. (2013) findings regarding enhanced auditory discrimination in 3-year-old children with higher levels of musical engagement in the home provide some insight, as it is possible that enhancements in the neural processing of sound would extend to musical as well as linguistic skills. Furthermore, evidence with respect to the effect of formal musical training on young children’s (4- to 6-years old) musical abilities has unsurprisingly shown that musician children exhibit advantages in the processing of musical sound (Fujioka et al., 2006; Hyde et al., 2009). Taken together, these findings raise the possibility that an enriched musical environment in the early years, informal as it may be, could positively influence the development of at least some aspects of musical ability in children.
In summary, inconclusive findings and limitations in previous research regarding informal musical experience in the home underscore the need for a more detailed examination of this factor and its potential effects on development. Therefore, one of the aims of this research project is to address this gap by exploring informal
musical interaction between parents and children within the family and examining whether this can affect language and musical development.