The development of musical tuning perception from infancy to adulthood

Three prominent hypotheses were evaluated by testing Western infants' and adults' abilities to detect mistunings in melodies based on native Western and non‐native Javanese scales. The “innateness hypothesis” of speech perception applied to music perception suggests that infants are born with an equipotential to perceive the scales of any culture. The “naturalness hypothesis” of auditory perception suggests that the ear is best suited for processing the small‐integer frequency ratios that comprise Western scales. Finally, the “perceptual loss hypothesis” of speech perception allied to music perception proposes that the ability to perceive non‐native scales is reduced and the ability to perceive native scales is maintained from infancy to adulthood. In support of the innateness hypothesis and in contradiction of the naturalness hypothesis, 5‐ to 7‐month‐old infants did not possess a perceptual bias for either Western or Javanese scales. The perceptual loss hypothesis was weakened because, although adults possessed a perceptual bias for the Western over the Javanese scales, adults' perception of both these scale types was better than that of infants. [Work supported by the American Psychological Association.]