Effects of Culture, Age, Gender, and Repeated Trials on Rote Song Learning Skills of Children 6-9 Years Old from England, Panama, Poland, Spain, and the United States.

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of repeated trials on children learning a new song. Subjects were 600 6- to 9-year-olds equally divided by age, gender, and country (England, Panama, Poland, Spain, and the United States). The song, an 18-tone newly composed song, was digitally recorded with a 1 0-year-old child's voice. Subjects individually listened to and sang back from the stimulus tape that modeled two nine-tone tunes (phrases A and B) and one combined 18-tone tune (phrase C). Three trials per phrase were given. Culture, age, gender, and nature of melodic patterns significantly influenced responses. Results indicated best to worst ranking by country were: Spain, Panama, England, Poland and the United States. Older students outperformed younger ones, and girls sang more accurately than boys. The phrase with more diatonic steps was more accurately repeated than the one with more leaps. More rhythmic than pitch and tonal accuracy occurred. For nearly half the responses, the first of three trials was surprisingly the most accurate. Children often repeated their own mistakes rather than improved with repeated trials. Learning the tune in parts seemed to interfere with singing it in its entirety.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.