ArticlePLoS biology2026
Human newborns form musical predictions based on rhythmic but not melodic structure.
Article in PLoS biology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Critical Review on the Development and Evolution of Beat Perception.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year.eLife · 2026Article
- The reciprocal relationship between maternal infant-directed singing and infant gaze.Musicae scientiae : the journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music · 2026Article
- InCHORRRuS: Infant-Directed Communication Highlights and Organizes Repetition and Redundancy Through Rhythmic Structure.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Rhythm Processing Across Development: Origins, Links to Language Processing, and Perspectives for Intervention.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Discovery, Interruption, and Updating of Auditory Regularities in Memory: Evidence from Low-Frequency Brain Dynamics in Human MEG.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- A developmental framework of interpersonal neural synchrony.Developmental review : DR · 2025Article
- Neural encoding of auditory rhythm beyond cortical auditory areas before the age of term.iScience · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to anticipate rhythmic and melodic structures in music is considered a fundamental human trait, present across all cultures and predating linguistic comprehension in human development. Yet, it remains unclear the extent to which this ability is already developed at birth. Here, we used temporal response functions to assess rhythmic and melodic neural encoding in newborns (N = 49) exposed to classical monophonic musical pieces (real condition) and control stimuli with shuffled tones and inter-onset intervals (shuffled condition). We computationally quantified context-based rhythmic and melodic expectations and dissociated these high-level processes from low-level acoustic tracking, such as local changes in timing and pitch. We observed encoding of probabilistic rhythmic expectations only in response to real but not shuffled music. This proves newborns' ability to rely on rhythmic statistical regularities to generate musical expectations. We found no evidence for the tracking of melodic information, demonstrating a downweighting of this dimension compared to the rhythmic one. This study provides neurophysiological evidence that the capacity to track statistical regularities in music is present at birth and driven by rhythm. Melodic tracking, in contrast, may receive more weight through development with exposure to signals relevant to communication, such as speech and music.
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