Absolute pitch in infancy and adulthood: the role of tonal structure

Despite many similarities in infant and adult auditory processing, the literature suggests that two aspects of music perception, pitch processing and knowledge of tonal structure, change over development. The current experiments assess the use of absolute and relative pitch cues in a tone sequence statistical learning task containing tonal structure. The results suggest that infants preferentially process absolute pitch patterns in continuous tone sequences, supporting the hypothesis that absolute pitch is present in infancy, whereas adults tracked both absolute and relative pitch patterns. Infants and adults detected the tonal structure in the input, suggesting that humans are attuned to basic aspects of tonality early in life.