When you tap your foot in time to your favorite song, you’re engaging in a process called beat induction: You pick out a periodic pulse from a nonrepetitive sequence of sounds, and you anticipate the next pulse in time to lift your foot and lower it again. The downbeat, or beginning of a rhythmic unit, might be louder or longer than the surrounding notes, but it doesn’t have to be—a regular downbeat can be induced even if it’s not marked by any special stress. Now, researchers in Hungary and the Netherlands, led by István Winkler of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam, have found that three-day-old infants are also capable of beat induction—a potentially important step toward understanding how older infants and children learn to process the sounds they hear.
The researchers had 14 babies listen to a repeating synthesized drum...
