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angeladou.bsky.social
@angeladou.bsky.social
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infantstudies.bsky.social
(2/2) By 20 months of age, infants integrated melody and lyrics, listening longer when either feature was modified @angeladou.bsky.social @lkcirelli.bsky.social #infancypapers onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Melody and Lyrics Are Integrated by Late Infancy During Recognition of Music Learned at Home
Familiar songs are often more effective than unfamiliar songs at capturing infant attention, regulating emotion, and eliciting rhythmic movements, but how infants rely on lyrics and melody to recogni...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
August 6, 2026 at 3:56 PM
Reposted
infantstudies.bsky.social
(1/2) @angeladou.bsky.social @lkcirelli.bsky.social et al. (2026) used an online preferential listening paradigm to present infants with song conditions that were familiar, novel, or mismatched in melody and lyric familiarity #infancypapers onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Melody and Lyrics Are Integrated by Late Infancy During Recognition of Music Learned at Home
Familiar songs are often more effective than unfamiliar songs at capturing infant attention, regulating emotion, and eliciting rhythmic movements, but how infants rely on lyrics and melody to recogni...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
August 6, 2026 at 3:56 PM
Reposted
mehr.nz
cool new paper from @lkcirelli.bsky.social's lab: early in development, infants are unbothered by mismatched melodies and lyrics in familiar songs (or comparably interested in matched vs mismatched)

older infants attend longer to mismatches, suggesting they can tell something's off. smart babies
Infancy | - RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS Melody and Lyrics Are Integrated by Late Infancy During Recognition of Music Learned at Home Angela Dou | Alexander C. Withers | Brianna A. Wedderburn | Laura K. Cirelli Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada Correspondence: Laura K. Cirelli (laura.cirelli@utoronto.ca) Received: 21 August 2025 | Revised: 2 June 2026 | Accepted: 5 June 2026 Handling Editor: Alejandrina Cristia Keywords: infancy | lyrics | melody | musical experiences | song familiarity ABSTRACT Familiar songs are often more effective than unfamiliar songs at capturing infant attention, regulating emotion, and eliciting rhythmic movements, but how infants rely on lyrics and melody to recognize well‐known music from their regular repertoire is not well understood. Here we investigate whether infants use these musical features selectively or interactively during song recognition across early development. Six‐ (n = 40), 11‐ (n = 47), and 20‐month‐old infants (n = 41) participated in an online preferential listening paradigm. We measured infants' attentive listening to a cappella recordings of Wheels on the Bus, an original composition, and two songs mismatched in melody and lyric familiarity (i.e., melody from Wheels paired with lyrics from the novel song, and vice versa). Confirmatory analyses showed that, while 6‐month‐olds behaved indiscriminately across conditions, the 20‐month‐olds listened longest to all conditions with at least one unfamiliar component. Exploratory analyses of infant rhythmic movements revealed that the 11‐month‐olds produced more rhythmic movements to familiar lyrics. Some infants, mostly the older infants, also produced lyrically‐relevant gestures more often when those lyrics were present than when they were not (e.g., rolling arms during “wheels” lyrics), across both familiar and unfamiliar songs. Results suggest that by late infancy, infants integrate lyrics and melody when recognizing … FIGURE 2 | Mean Attentive Listening Across Song Conditions. Depicts mean attentive listening times across each of the song conditions among the (A) 6‐, (B) 11‐, and (C) 20‐month‐old age groups. Smaller red circles and blue triangles (corresponding to familiar and unfamiliar lyrics respectively) represent infants' mean listening times, and each infant's mean score is represented for each of the song conditions. Observed means from the same infant are connected by the gray lines. The larger black circles for each of the song conditions represent mean listening times across all infants in each age group. Overall trends across song conditions are joined by the black lines. Error bars represent within‐subjects SEM.
June 21, 2026 at 8:20 PM
angeladou.bsky.social
Had the best time at #icmpc18 where I presented my work at a symposium on parent-infant musical interaction. Also co-presented a poster with @lkcirelli.bsky.social on kindergarten transition with help of song- ongoing project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Amazing week in beautiful São Paulo!
July 28, 2025 at 3:18 PM
angeladou.bsky.social
Excited to share a paper from myself and
@lkcirelli.bsky.social focused on caregiver-infant musical interactions in the home! (1/6)

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
The Active Infant's Developing Role in Musical Interactions: Insights From an Online Parent Questionnaire
Musical interactions between caregivers and their infants typically rely on a limited repertoire of live vocal songs and recorded music. Research suggests that these well-known songs are especially e...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
January 9, 2025 at 10:32 PM