Texarkana Gazette

Sandra Trehub, pioneer in the psychology of music, dies at 84

- OLIVER WHANG

Sandra Trehub, a psychologi­st and researcher whose work helped illuminate how children perceive sound, and how lullabies and music fit into their cognitive and social developmen­t, died Jan. 20 at her home in Toronto. She was 84.

The death was confirmed by her son Andrew Cohen.

Over a half-century as a psychologi­st at the University of Toronto, where she began working in 1973, Trehub produced seminal work in the field that is now known as the psychology of music.

“Back then, there were very few people in psychology and neuroscien­ce who were studying music at all as a human behavior,” Laurel Trainor, a psychologi­st at Mcmaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said in a phone interview.

Trehub’s research found that there are indeed universall­y shared responses to music among infants, beginning with sing-song-y baby talk by parents across different cultures. She found that infants prefer certain melodic intervals over others and can grasp the contour and shape of a lullaby. She further establishe­d that infants and toddlers can — better than adults — notice difference­s in some elements of music from other countries and cultures, both tonal and rhythmic. That finding suggested that as people get older, their ability to distinguis­h discrepanc­ies in unfamiliar music decreases while their ability to notice nuance in familiar music increases.

“Sandra was the first psychologi­st to study musical abilities for their own sake in infants,” Isabelle Peretz, a neuroscien­tist at the University of Montreal, wrote in an email. Before Trehub, she added, many researcher­s thought “that musicality was a pure cultural product which was acquired and possessed by a few select people: the musicians.” It is now widely accepted that music is an important developmen­tal tool for everyone, starting in infancy, and that musical fluency among parents can deeply affect their children’s long-term health and mental developmen­t. “Her work helps to legitimize early childhood music education, which basically didn’t exist before the 1980s,” Samuel Mehr, a psychologi­st at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and director of the Music Lab at Haskins Laboratori­es, Yale University, said by email.

Trehub’s findings might seem intuitive or even obvious now, he added, but that only highlights the importance of her work. “Every bit of research in the psychology of music over the past 40 years can be traced back to Sandra Trehub,” he said.

Some of her earliest work showed how infants as young as 1 month old could distinguis­h between speech sounds; in a paper, she wrote that babies would increase their “sucking rate” on an artificial nipple when new vowels were introduced. Using the same methodolog­y, Trehub went on to show in another paper how babies can distinguis­h between sounds in some foreign languages better than adults. That finding, said Janet Werker, a psychologi­st at the University of British Columbia, provided the groundwork for a large body of subsequent research demonstrat­ing that babies are born with the ability to pick up on the basic acoustics of any of the world’s languages. The research has served to heighten the importance of early exposure to foreign languages, with continuing ramificati­ons in education.

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