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Short Research Note

Appraisal of Musical Syntax Violations by Primary School Children

Effects of Age and Practice

Published Online:June 19, 2012https://doi.org/10.1024/1421-0185/a000084

Abstract

In Western tonal music, musical phrases end with an explicit, highly expected, harmonic consequent. Primary school children were exposed to musical stimuli at two levels of complexity: children’s songs and polyphonic piano pieces. The endings (cadences) of all stimuli were either congruous or contained subtle or marked syntax violations, resulting in three levels of syntactic congruity. The children rated the endings of musical stimuli with respect to goodness of fit by drawing a crossbar through a continuous line stretching between a happy and a sad icon. All children, independent of age, rated the three levels of syntactic congruity hierarchically, for both levels of complexity. Compared to younger children, older children gave more extreme positive and negative ratings to congruous and markedly incongruous endings, respectively, but no developmental trend was found for the intermediate ratings of subtly incongruous endings. We conclude that, as a consequence of mere exposure, implicit learning of musical syntax manifests already in 6-year-old children and develops progressively with age. Moreover, we found indications of modulation of this perceptual development by musical training, an effect reminiscent of the interaction between long-term spontaneous developmental processes and deliberate learning in general cognitive functioning.

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