[randita]

I have had experience in teaching music to young children. I agree that to a baby, speech is music. They are fascinated with the tone, inflection, and how the sound is produced. Babies will look intently at a person’s eyes and mouth when they are being spoken to even when they haven’t a clue what is being said.

They love being read to even when only a few months old. Story telling with exaggerated vocal inflections is music to them.

Speech is tone and rhythm in a usually narrow range of pitch and with short tones, rather than long ones.

[afraidfortherepublic]

I have had experience in teaching music to young children. I agree that to a baby, speech is music. They are fascinated with the tone, inflection, and how the sound is produced

I wonder how this relates to dogs and dog training? A lot of dog trainers use elaborate vocalizations and tones to train their charges. "G-o-o-o-d B-oi-oi-y" And some use only hand signals.

[lonevoice]

As seen in this, one of my favorite youtubes ever, of twin babies “talking” to each other. It's obvious they're mimicking tones, inflections, rhythms and phonemes in speech that they've heard. Their accompanying body movements are often matching the rhythms of the sounds they're making as well.

http://youtu.be/_JmA2ClUvUY

[Dr. Bogus Pachysandra]

The third word I learned was “Usmic.” Mom would put on a stack of piano Boogie Woogie 78s to keep me entertained and quiet. When the stack played out, I’d start screaming for “Usmic! Usmic!” and she’d flip the stack over. Explains a lot! I hear music in my head, non-stop.