AIRS 3rd Annual Meeting: 2013

Title: Comparison of singing acquisition in French speaking and English speaking kindergarten
children using VAMDA
Authors: Stéphanie Boisvert (Department of Music Education, Université Laval), Dr. Jonathan
Bolduc (Department of Music Education, Université Laval, Dr. Maria Teresa Moreno Sala
(Department of Music Education, Université Laval,

Christine Tsang (Department of

Psychology, Huron University College at Western, London, ON), Laurel Trainor (Dept. of
Psychology, Neuroscience, and Behaviour, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON)

Abstract

Introduction: The vocal-sensorimotor loop model of singing (Dalla Bella, Berkowska, &
Sowinski, 2011) suggests that memory, motor skill, perception and feedback all contribute to
singing ability. Many components of the vocal sensorimotor loop begin to develop during
infancy, but take a long time to reach maturity (Tsang, Friendly & Trainor, 2011). This
presentation will highlight differences and/or similarities between singing perception of
kindergarten children from two different samples: English participants versus French
participants.
Method: In Québec, 69 French speaking kindergarten’s children were tested. The Vocal
Auditory Motor Development Assessment (VAMDA) as developed by Tsang and Trainor
(2011) measured participants’ perception and production (pitch-matching). In the VAMDA,
children discriminated small pitch interval changes (from 5 cents to 200 cents) and short
melodies 2 to 4 notes in length. Children were also asked to reproduce the same pitch and
melodies. Approximately 50 English-speaking 6-year-olds were tested under at Ontario and UK
sites previously (Fancourt & Tsang, 2012) as reported at the 2012 AIRS 4th Annual meeting,
using the same pitch perception and production measures in the VAMDA. While the Digit Span
subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children assessed short term memory for the
English participants, the French version used the task “mémoire immediate” from the K-ABC I
(Kauffman & Kauffman, 1993).
Results: The data analyses of the Quebec sample are ongoing. However, with English speaking
sample, as previously reported, there was a significant correlation between raw score on the
digit span task and performance on the melody discrimination task. There was also a significant
correlation between raw vocabulary scores and performance on the pitch interval
discrimination task. Furthermore, the previously reported results for the English children show

 that in comparison to adult singers, the children were generally poor pitch singers (e.g., average
mean deviation of pitch > 3 semitones). Interestingly, poor singing accuracy in both single pitch
and melody matching was negatively correlated to performance on the melody discrimination
task. We expect that French speaking children will show similar perception and production
correlations as the English speaking children. Previous research with children in the UK using
the VAMDA found similar relationships between singing measures and cognitive measures.
Discussion: The results of this research study may further validate the VAMDA as well as shed
light on the role of native language acquisition in singing development.