The ability to hear differences in pitch of a tone or a speech syllable (ba) in children and adults

What is it about?

We measured the smallest detectable difference in pitch for low-pitch tones and a speech syllable ("ba") in 5- to 10-year-old children and young adults. Previous research has shown that children are surprisingly bad at hearing out a change in pitch for higher-pitched tones. We wanted to see if they were also bad at this task when tested with low-pitch tones or speech. One reason they might be better with lower pitches is that they can rehearse -- imagine themselves producing this pitch. To encourage that type of strategy we used stimuli that were approximately that pitch of a child's voice (250 Hz). Performance improved with child age for both the tone and the speech stimulus, and we didn't see any evidence that young children are relatively better at judging low pitch (current study) than high pitch (previous studies).

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Why is it important?

Previous pitch discrimination data for tones indicate that children are much poorer than adults at detecting a change in pitch. The present study supports the idea that this developmental trend generalizes to speech. That is important because pitch conveys speech information. In English, pitch conveys pragmatic information, and in tonal languages it conveys lexical information. Our results suggest that young children's speech processing may be limited by immature pitch discrimination abilities.