The purpose of this study was to investigate whether young infants would differentiate sedative vocal music in their mother tongue versus sedative vocal music in a foreign language. It was hypothesized that if infants did discriminate between the two languages, they would demonstrate a preference for their mother tongue. The responses of ten one- to four-day-old full-term infants were recorded by measuring their sucking rate while presenting lullabies. The infants were randomly and evenly divided into two groups. The first group heard four presentations of the mother tongue version followed by four presentations of the foreign language version. The second group heard the foreign language version of a lullaby followed by the same lullaby sung in the infant's mother tongue. A 5-second interval of silence was spaced between lullabies. The lullaby chose was Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It was performed by a classically trained soprano, in English, French, and Italian, and Russian. Russian was chosen as the foreign language and English, French, and Italian covered the mother tongues for all infants in the study. / Results revealed that infants were not able to detect a difference between the mother tongue version of the lullaby as opposed to the foreign language version. However, the results of the present study may be attributed to an insufficient sample size and to the ineffectiveness of the methodology employed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.24088 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Kovács-Mazza, Jolán |
| Contributors | Wapnick, Joel (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Faculty of Music.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001537773, proquestno: MM19901, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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