Infant
vocal production has been studied mainly from the perspective of language
development. We studied it from the perspective of singing development by
analyzing a 15-month-old’s imitations of songs. The infant wore a recording
device that yielded a continuous, 16-hr audio recording of all the sounds
produced by him and around him throughout the day. We listened to the audio
file and identified instances in which his unprompted vocalizations resembled
songs he had heard earlier. One imitation was recognized by his father, who
then sang the song himself and engaged in imitative turn taking with the
infant; the other imitation went unnoticed by his parents. Perceptual and
acoustic analyses of the imitations and the song models showed that the
infant imitated critical music features of the songs, including pitches,
intervals, and rhythms. We discuss the use of new technologies for the study
of singing development in infancy; such technologies facilitate the
collection of spontaneous vocalizations that may go unnoticed by parents and
make it possible to trace connections between music environment opportunities
and specific singing outcomes in infants.
