Effects of Groove on Children’s Music-Related Movements in Their Home Environment

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Abstract

The drive to move to music is evident across a variety of contexts, from the simple urge to tap your toe to a song on the radio, to massive crowds dancing to the same beat at a rock concert. Though seemingly effortless, these behaviors require listeners to extract the beat of the music and align their movements with it (entrainment). Recent work has found that deficits in rhythmic abilities are associated with speech-language impairment (Gordon et al., 2015) and motor difficulties (Trainor et al., 2018) in childhood. Early musical engagement has been proposed as one possible remediation via strengthening auditory-motor connections.

An issue that has been relatively understudied concerns how stimulus properties might affect young children’s movement to music. It is well-established that music that has high pulse clarity and syncopated rhythms, colloquially described as “groovy” music, drives the desire to move more strongly than other styles of music (Janata et al, 2012). The vast majority of work in this domain has been done with Western adults, and numerous questions remain about how and why these “groovy” features drive motor entrainment.

In the present study, we seek to examine whether groove facilitates auditory-motor entrainment and positive affect in 3- to 6-year-old children. We selected one-minute musical excerpts at two tempos (120 and 170 beats per minute). Within each tempo condition, there was an excerpt previously rated by adults to be high-groove and one previously rated to be low-groove (Janata et al., 2012). The order of the stimuli are randomized, assembled into a playlist, and sent to parents. Parents then video-record their children’s spontaneous movements while the music plays in the comfort of their own home. Parents are instructed to refrain from moving themselves, but they can encourage the children to dance during silent periods between trials. The videos are subsequently coded in ELAN (e.g., Sloetjes & Wittenburg, 2008) by trained coders who are blind to the condition (i.e., code with the sound off). Coders indicate the proportion of time that children move rhythmically (“rhythmic bursts”; e.g. clapping, head-bobbing, dancing), the tempo of movements during bursts, the energy of bursts, and the amount of positive affect displayed by the child (e.g. smiling, laughing) in each condition.

Data collection is ongoing (current N = 60) with a target sample size N = 100. Preliminary analysis of a random subset of 8 participants indicated that they moved rhythmically for a greater proportion of time, moved with greater energy, and demonstrated more positive affect during the groovy than non-groovy excerpts. The results of the present study will help to clarify early auditory-motor links, and represent an important step in facilitating optimization of potential musical and rhythmic interventions for children with motor and language deficits.

Authors

• Haley Kragness, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Laura K. Cirelli, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author