The Role of Melodic and Verbal Organization in the Reproduction of Rhythmic Groups by Children

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Abstract
Children of 5 to 6 years are generally thought not to have acquired a sense of stable key in music. This experiment shows that specialized tutoring allows them to acquire and use the specific functions of the tonic and dominant as points of stability and boundaries for grouping rhythmic sequences in a reproduction task. Untrained children of the same age do not use the cues provided by the tonal system, but lean rather upon verbal boundaries (in the sense of syntactic constituents). Three analyses of the results demonstrated that (a) verbal and melodic cues superimposed onto rhythmic models were used differently according to the musical competence of the child; (b) children do not always respect tempo or accentuation, but generally produce highly structured sequence; (c) the temporal sequences reproduced have a hierarchical organization on two levels: local organization, which can be considered related to episodic memory and global organization, which is related to semantic memory and so is dependent on the subject's musical knowledge.