Name:Pauline, Larrouy-Maestri

School/Affiliation:Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Co-Authors:Marion Hubin & Dominique Morsomme

Virtual or In-person:In-person

Short Bio:

Pauline Larrouy-Maestri is a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany. With a background in pedagogy, psychology, music performance (piano), and speech-language pathology, she completed a PhD in cognitive sciences. Pauline and her team employ complementary approaches to investigate how we categorize acoustic information and make sense of sounds, with a particular focus on vocalizations.

Abstract:

Children's singing accuracy is known to improve throughout childhood (Demorest & Pfordresher, 2015; Welch, 2016); however, the precise shape of this developmental trajectory and the sources of its substantial variability remain unclear. To investigate this, we analyzed the performances of 297 children aged 3-10 years who sang "Happy Birthday" individually, before and after a warm-up. Using computer-assisted methods, we quantified singing accuracy through two measures across complete performances: pitch interval precision and number of tonal modulations (Larrouy-Maestri et al., 2013). Results revealed that singing accuracy improved with age overall, but growth curve modeling uncovered a complex non-linear trajectory characterized by alternating periods of accelerated improvement and developmental plateaus. We identified specific "developmental spurts" around ages 5 and 9, where children showed significantly greater improvements in interval precision. Interestingly, the starting pitch of melodies—an indicator of vocal comfort zone—followed a similar developmental pattern, suggesting a parallel between singing accuracy and physiological changes of the vocal apparatus. Crucially, these developmental patterns were associated with the children singing repertoire. Altogether, these findings indicate that environmental factors interact with physiological development, demonstrating that both biological maturation and practice play essential roles in shaping singing development.