Meaning and Entrainment in Language and Music Special Issue: Introduction

overview of special double issu

Facilitating support groups for siblings of children with neurodevelopmental disorders using audioconferencing: a longitudinal feasibility study

Background: Siblings of children with chronic illness and disabilities are at increased risk of negative psychological effects. Support groups enable them to access psycho-education and social support. Barriers to this can include the distance they have to travel to meet face-to-face. Audio-conferencing, whereby three or more people can connect by telephone in different locations, is an efficient means of groups meeting and warrants exploration in this healthcare context. This study explored the feasibility of audio-conferencing as a method of facilitating sibling support groups. Methods: A longitudinal design was adopted. Participants were six siblings (aged eight to thirteen years) and parents of children with complex neurodevelopmental disorders attending the Centre for Interventional Paediatric Psychopharmacology (CIPP). Four of the eight one-hour weekly sessions were held face-to-face and the other four using audio-conferencing. Pre- and post-intervention questionnaires and interviews were completed and three to six month follow-up interviews were carried out. The sessions were audio-recorded, transcribed and thematic analysis was undertaken. Results: Audio-conferencing as a form of telemedicine was acceptable to all six participants and was effective in facilitating sibling support groups. Audio-conferencing can overcome geographical barriers to children being able to receive group therapeutic healthcare interventions such as social support and psycho-education. Psychopathology ratings increased post-intervention in some participants. Siblings reported that communication between siblings and their family members increased and siblings’ social network widened. Conclusions: Audio-conferencing is an acceptable, feasible and effective method of facilitating sibling support groups. Siblings’ clear accounts of neuropsychiatric symptoms render them reliable informants. Systematic assessment of siblings’ needs and strengthened links between Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, school counsellors and young carers groups are warranted

Comparing the benefits of parent–infant flute and singing groups for communication and parenting: A feasibility study

There is growing evidence highlighting benefits of musical exposure and participation on several aspects of development and parenting. Aiming to establish a rigorous protocol allowing researchers to study different types of musical interactions and their benefits on the development of early communication, the present study explored parents’ experiences of musically engaging with their infants in different types of music groups. Twenty-five infants and their parents were randomly assigned to one of three groups: (1) singing, (2) flute playing, or (3) control group. Music sessions were held weekly for 14 weeks and were followed by the home use of the recorded routines specific of each group, for further 3 months. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the experimental groups’ participants, and pre/post quantitative developmental measures were collected from all groups, to assess participants’ compliance. Qualitative analyses of the interviews revealed both shared themes, (communication enhancement, enjoyment, and regulation); and unique themes (creativity and freedom in the flute group; familiarity and responsiveness in the singing group). The feasibility study was successful in establishing a workable protocol to use in RCT longitudinal interventions aiming to examine how specific aspects of the musical experience might differentially support developmental outcomes, in parent–infant groups

Music@Home: a novel instrument to assess the home musical environment in the early years

The majority of children under the age of 5 appear to show spontaneous enjoyment of singing, being exposed to music and interacting with musical instruments, but whether variations in engaging in such activities in the home could contribute to developmental outcomes is still largely unknown. Critically, researchers lack a comprehensive instrument with good psychometric properties to assess the home musical environment from infancy to the preschool years. To address this gap, this paper presents two studies that describe the development and validation of the Music@Home questionnaire, which comprises two versions: Infant and Preschool. In Study 1, an initial pool of items was generated and administered to a wide audience of parents (n = 287 for the Infant, n = 347 for the Preschool version). Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify different dimensions comprising the home musical environment of both infants and pre-schoolers, and to reduce the initial pool of items to a smaller number of meaningful items. In Study 2, convergent and divergent validity and internal and test-retest reliability of the new instrument were established, using data from a different sample of participants (n = 213 for the Infant, n = 213 for the Preschool version). The second study also investigated associations between the Music@Home and musical characteristics of the parents, such as their musical education and personal engagement with music. Overall, the Music@Home constitutes a novel, valid and reliable instrument that allows for the systematic assessment of distinct aspects of the home musical environment in families with children under the age of 5. Furthermore, the Infant and Preschool versions of the Music@Home present differential associations with musical characteristics of the parents opening a new area of inquiry into how musical exposure and interaction in the home may vary across different developmental stages

Western tonal knowledge in 3- and 4-year-old children: A pilot study

Implicit knowledge of the rules governing music structure in any given culture is acquired through exposure to a particular music system and seems to follow a developmental trajectory from infancy to early adolescence. The course of acquisition of this knowledge in preschool children has been understudied and existing findings are somewhat inconsistent, largely depending on the use of either explicit or implicit tasks. Even though 2.5 to 5-year-old children have been shown to possess knowledge of harmonic rules when tested with implicit measures such as electroencephalography (EEG; Corrigall & Trainor, 2013; Jentschke, Friederici, & Koelsch, 2014) and a harmonic priming paradigm (Marin, 2009) they did not seem to perform above chance level in an explicit task which requested them to make judgments about the “goodness” of melodies (Corrigall & Trainor, 2013). In this study we presented 4-year-old children with simple and engaging explicit tasks. We compared their performance to that of 3-year old children, an age group which has not yet been consistently tested with respect to their understanding of Western tonal structure. Pilot results showed that 4- year-olds (but not 3-year-olds) performed above chance level in one of the tasks, suggesting that their knowledge of Western tonal structure can be expressed through explicit judgments if suitable measures are used. A more sensitive implicit task is also being developed (harmonic priming paradigm; Schellenberg, Bigand, Poulin-Charronnat, Garnier, & Stevens, 2005) to be administered to the same age groups. This investigation sheds light on the developmental acquisition of Western tonal knowledge and discusses methodological considerations in the assessment of preschool children.      Keywords: Western music structure, music processing, preschool childrenReferencesCorrigall, K. a, & Trainor, L. J. (2013). Enculturation to musical pitch structure in young children: evidence from behavioral and electrophysiological methods. Developmental Science, 1–17. doi:10.1111/desc.12100Jentschke, S., Friederici, A. D., & Koelsch, S. (2014). Neural correlates of music-syntactic processing in two-year old children. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 200–8. doi:10.1016/j.dcn.2014.04.005Marin, M. M. (2009). Effects of early musical training on musical and linguistic syntactic abilities. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169, 187–190. doi:10.1111/j.1749- 6632.2009.04777.xSchellenberg, E. G., Bigand, E., Poulin-Charronnat, B., Garnier, C., & Stevens, C. (2005). Children’s implicit knowledge of harmony in Western music. Developmental Science, 8(6), 551–66. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7687.2005.00447.

Melodic expectations in 5- and 6-year-old children

It has been argued that children implicitly acquire the rules relating to the structure of music in their environment using domain-general mechanisms such as statistical learning. Closely linked to statistical learning is the ability to form expectations about future events. Whether children as young as 5 years can make use of such internalized regularities to form expectations about the next note in a melody is still unclear. The possible effect of the home musical environment on the strength of musical expectations has also been under-explored. Using a newly developed melodic priming task that included melodies with either “expected” or “unexpected” endings according to rules of Western music theory, we tested 5- and 6-year-old children (N = 46). The stimuli in this task were constructed using the information dynamics of music (IDyOM) system, a probabilistic model estimating the level of “unexpectedness” of a note given the preceding context. Results showed that responses to expected versus unexpected tones were faster and more accurate, indicating that children have already formed robust melodic expectations at 5 years of age. Aspects of the home musical environment significantly predicted the strength of melodic expectations, suggesting that implicit musical learning may be influenced by the quantity of informal exposure to the surrounding musical environment

Can children with autism read emotions from the eyes? The eyes test revisited

This study aimed to test two new, simplified tasks related to the eye-test, targeting children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and typically developing controls (TD). Test-1 assessed the recognition of emotion/mental states with displays using one word and two eye-pictures, whereas Test-2 presented displays using two words and one eye-picture. Black and white photographs of children were used as materials. A cross-cultural study (Caucasian/East-Asian) with adults was initially carried out to verify generalizability across different ethnic groups. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses were used to compare emotion recognition from the eyes in the two tests. Trajectories were constructed linking performance on both tests either to chronological age or to different measures of mental age (receptive vocabulary based on the BPVS, CARS or ASQ for the ASD group). Performance improved with chronological age in both the ASD and TD groups of children. However, performance in Test-1 was significantly superior in children with ASD, who showed delayed onset and slower rate of improvement than TD children in Test-2. In both the ASD and TD groups the lowest error rate was recorded for the item ‘anger’, suggesting that threat-detection cue mechanisms may be intact in Autism. In general, all children showed good performance on our novel tests, thus making them good candidates for assessing younger children and those with lower general abilities