The Development of the Child' s Conception of Meter in Music

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Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of the child' s ability to conceptualize and identify meter in music. Eleven musical tasks, based largely on Piaget' s theory of the child' s conception of time, were administered individually to 66 children, ages 5– 12. The tasks were arranged in order of increasing difficulty, and a scalogram analysis was performed on the data. Green' s index of consistency for the scale was .854 (an index of .5 or above represents satisfactory scalability). Although the order of difficulty of the 11 tasks may not be regarded as invariant, an analysis of the responses provided support for Piaget' s idea that the child' s conception of time develops through three invariant stages. The meter concept seems to develop after about age 91/2, although many children in this study between ages 91/2 and 12 had some difficulty understanding the meter concept and identifying the meter of rhythm patterns following a pretraining session.

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