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@angeladou.bsky.social

International Congress of Infant Studies @infantstudies.bsky.social · 2w ago

(2/2) By 20 months of age, infants integrated melody and lyrics, listening longer when either feature was modified @angeladou.bsky.social @lkcirelli.bsky.social #infancypapers onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Melody and Lyrics Are Integrated by Late Infancy During Recognition of Music Learned at Home

Familiar songs are often more effective than unfamiliar songs at capturing infant attention, regulating emotion, and eliciting rhythmic movements, but how infants rely on lyrics and melody to recogni...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

International Congress of Infant Studies @infantstudies.bsky.social · 2w ago

(1/2) @angeladou.bsky.social @lkcirelli.bsky.social et al. (2026) used an online preferential listening paradigm to present infants with song conditions that were familiar, novel, or mismatched in melody and lyric familiarity #infancypapers onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Melody and Lyrics Are Integrated by Late Infancy During Recognition of Music Learned at Home

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 2mo ago

cool new paper from @lkcirelli.bsky.social's lab: early in development, infants are unbothered by mismatched melodies and lyrics in familiar songs (or comparably interested in matched vs mismatched) older infants attend longer to mismatches, suggesting they can tell something's off. smart babies

Infancy |
- RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS
Melody and Lyrics Are Integrated by Late Infancy During
Recognition of Music Learned at Home
Angela Dou | Alexander C. Withers | Brianna A. Wedderburn | Laura K. Cirelli
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
Correspondence: Laura K. Cirelli (laura.cirelli@utoronto.ca)
Received: 21 August 2025 | Revised: 2 June 2026 | Accepted: 5 June 2026
Handling Editor: Alejandrina Cristia
Keywords: infancy | lyrics | melody | musical experiences | song familiarity
ABSTRACT
Familiar songs are often more effective than unfamiliar songs at capturing infant attention, regulating emotion, and eliciting
rhythmic movements, but how infants rely on lyrics and melody to recognize well‐known music from their regular repertoire is
not well understood. Here we investigate whether infants use these musical features selectively or interactively during song
recognition across early development. Six‐ (n = 40), 11‐ (n = 47), and 20‐month‐old infants (n = 41) participated in an online
preferential listening paradigm. We measured infants' attentive listening to a cappella recordings of Wheels on the Bus, an
original composition, and two songs mismatched in melody and lyric familiarity (i.e., melody from Wheels paired with lyrics
from the novel song, and vice versa). Confirmatory analyses showed that, while 6‐month‐olds behaved indiscriminately across
conditions, the 20‐month‐olds listened longest to all conditions with at least one unfamiliar component. Exploratory analyses of
infant rhythmic movements revealed that the 11‐month‐olds produced more rhythmic movements to familiar lyrics. Some
infants, mostly the older infants, also produced lyrically‐relevant gestures more often when those lyrics were present than when
they were not (e.g., rolling arms during “wheels” lyrics), across both familiar and unfamiliar songs. Results suggest that by late
infancy, infants integrate lyrics and melody when recognizing …

FIGURE 2 | Mean Attentive Listening Across Song Conditions. Depicts mean attentive listening times across each of the song conditions among
the (A) 6‐, (B) 11‐, and (C) 20‐month‐old age groups. Smaller red circles and blue triangles (corresponding to familiar and unfamiliar lyrics
respectively) represent infants' mean listening times, and each infant's mean score is represented for each of the song conditions. Observed means
from the same infant are connected by the gray lines. The larger black circles for each of the song conditions represent mean listening times
across all infants in each age group. Overall trends across song conditions are joined by the black lines. Error bars represent within‐subjects SEM.

@angeladou.bsky.social · last yr.

Had the best time at #icmpc18 where I presented my work at a symposium on parent-infant musical interaction. Also co-presented a poster with @lkcirelli.bsky.social on kindergarten transition with help of song- ongoing project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Amazing week in beautiful São Paulo!

@angeladou.bsky.social · 2y ago

Excited to share a paper from myself and @lkcirelli.bsky.social focused on caregiver-infant musical interactions in the home! (1/6) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

The Active Infant's Developing Role in Musical Interactions: Insights From an Online Parent Questionnaire

Musical interactions between caregivers and their infants typically rely on a limited repertoire of live vocal songs and recorded music. Research suggests that these well-known songs are especially e...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com