Some researchers are interested in documenting effects that listening to music may have
on children’s development. One line of work in this area focuses on what children learn about
music itself by listening to music. Another line of work investigates how listening to particular
forms of music may impact development outside of the musical domain. Explorations of the
influence of experience on children’s ability to match auditory and visual stimuli within the
domain of music are an example of the first research direction. Pick, Gross, Heinrichs, and Love
(1994) explored whether young children could recognize the source of different sounds from
instruments in different families, as well as different instruments within an instrumental family.
Pick et al. (1994) asked 107 3-7 year old children to watch a video of two musicians playing
different instruments while a soundtrack from one of the instruments was played. Results
showed children between the ages of 5- and 7-years of age were able to differentiate between 6
different types of instruments as well as instruments within an instrumental family that
differentiated by size and pitch. Children between the ages of 3- and 4-years of age were able to
differentiate different musical families, but not different instruments within the same family. In
a second study group, Pick et al. (1994) showed that infants between 7- and 9-months of age
looked longer at the musical instrument that corresponded with the soundtrack. These findings
suggest that experiences with seeing and hearing musical performances over the first few years
of life, likely influence what children know about the relationship between instruments and
sounds. However, the finding that even young infants know something about the sounds
particular instruments make suggests that experience is not the only explanation.