Newborn infants process pitch intervals

Objective: We investigated whether the auditory system of newborn babies extracts the constancy of a pitch interval from exemplars varying in absolute pitch. Methods: Event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded from healthy newborn infants in an oddball paradigm consisting of frequent standard and infrequent deviant tone pairs. Tone pairs varied in absolute frequency. Standard and deviant pairs differed in the amount of pitch difference within the pairs, but not in the direction of pitch change. Results: Deviant tone pairs elicited a discriminative ERP response. Conclusions: This result suggests that the neonate auditory system represents pitch intervals similarly to adults. Significance: Adult-like processing of pitch intervals allows newborn infants to learn music, speech prosody, and to process various important auditory cues based on spectral acoustic features.