Mendoza, J. & Fausey, C.
University of Oregon
Singing with young infants is a ubiquitous human activity. How do parents select what to sing, of all songs? How do infants learn coherent structures across the experienced words, rhythms, and melodies? We present evidence that the early musical ecology may be well-suited to the statistical sampling and learning challenges of infants and their parents. Parents (n=97, 6-18 months) completed a questionnaire about their everyday musical experience. Their answers to the question "Does your infant have any favorite songs?" reveal a limited range of readily available songs: (1) Most parents (.59) easily remembered and reported specific songs; (2) From the estimated 97 million songs in the universe (King, 2011), there were only 73 unique songs across parents; (3) The same three songs (Itsy Bitsy Spider, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, ABCs) accounted for a quarter of the distribution, and nearly half of parents (.49) reported that their infant's favorite song was one of these three. These findings match distributional properties of songs that parents sing to their infant in a laboratory setting (Bergeson & Trehub, 1999), strongly suggesting a constrained early ecology. A reduced musical workspace may support memory retrieval in the singer and learning in the listener.