Human Infants' Perception of Auditory Patterns

Humaninfants' perception of tone sequences or melodies is reviewed  the contextof related work with human adults and nonhuman species. For the  part,infants use an adult-like pitch processing strategy that is global and  ratherthan the local pitch strategy that is characteristic of the nonhuman species stud date. Thus they encode and retain the pitch configuration or contour of  withlittle attention to the absolute pitches of individual notes. In the case  structured melodies,specifically, melodies that are prototypical of Western music, in encodemore precise relations, notably the intervals or exact pitch relations be adjacentnotes. Finally, the functional significance of relational pitch  inhuman infancy is  consideredprocessingtweenfantsof wella melody,iedto relationalmosti