Young children are slow to master conventional intonation patterns in their yes/no questions, which may stem from imperfect understanding of the links between terminal pitch contours and pragmatic intentions. In Experiment 1, five- to ten-year-old children and adults were required to judge utterances as questions or statements on the basis of intonation alone. Children eight years of age or younger performed above chance levels but less accurately than adult listeners. To ascertain whether the verbal content of utterances interfered with young children's attention to the relevant acoustic cues, low-pass filtered versions of the same utterances were presented to children and adults in Experiment 2. Low-pass filtering reduced performance comparably for all age groups, perhaps because such filtering reduced the salience of critical pitch cues. Young children's difficulty in differentiating declarative questions from statements is not attributable to basic perceptual difficulties but rather to absent or unstable intonation categories.

Neurodevelopmental disorders such as spina bifida meningomyelocele (SBM) are often associated with dysrhythmic movement. We studied rhythm discrimination in 21 children with SBM and in 21 age-matched controls, with the research question being whether both groups showed a strong-meter advantage whereby rhythm discrimination is better for rhythms with a strong-meter, in which onsets of longer intervals occurred on the beat, than those with a weak-meter, in which onsets of longer intervals occurred off the beat. Compared to controls, the SBM group was less able to discriminate strong-meter rhythms, although they performed comparably in discriminating weak-meter rhythms. The attenuated strong-meter advantage in children with SBM shows that their rhythm deficits occur at the level of both perception and action, and may represent a central processing disruption of the brain mechanisms for rhythm. (JINS, 2009, 15, 521–528.)

A basic aspect of emotional responding to music involves the liking for specific pieces. Juslin & Västfjäll (J&V) fail to acknowledge that simple exposure plays a fundamental role in this regard. Listeners like what they have heard but not what they have heard too often. Exposure represents an additional mechanism, ignored by the authors, that helps to explain emotional responses to music.

Deliberate practice and experience may suffice as predictors of expertise, but they cannot account for spectacular achievements. Highly variable environmental and biological factors provide facilitating as well as constraining conditions for development, generating relative plasticity rather than absolute plasticity. The skills of virtuosos and idiots savants are more consistent with the talent account than with the deliberate-practice account.