Text-to-tune alignment in speech and song
Karen M. Arnold, Peter W. Jusczyk · 2002
Musical and linguistic systems are similar in many aspects, including a common timecourse of acquisition and the use of many of the same cues to express structure.Any direct parallels between the systems would be beneficial to infants, who are learning both simultaneously.Using ToBI (Tones and Breaks Indices) analyses of spoken renditions of nursery rhymes and modified ToBI analyses (coding only for locations of high and low targets) of sung versions of the same texts, a strong correspondence was found between melodic and intonational contours of the same materials.These results bear on questions of learnability and bootstrapping in both realms.