Rhythm and Tonality in Children's Recognition of Intact and Distorted Melodies.

ABSTRACT Five-to-10-year-old children identified familiar melodies presented in three ways: intact, wandering with the same key, or wandering outside the key. Previous work with rhythmically uniform melodies had shown a regular developmental progression in the use of contour, tonality, and exact pitch intervals in melody identification. In this study, with rhythmically distinctive melodies, performance was better, and children used the rhythmic cues by 5 years. Two of the four melodies showed the developmental ordering obtained previously. (Author/K)!)