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The authors replicate and extend findings from previous studies of music enculturation by comparing music memory performance of children to that of adults when listening to culturally familiar and unfamiliar music. Forty-three children and 50 adults, all born and raised in the United States, completed a music memory test comprising unfamiliar excerpts of Western and Turkish classical music. Examples were selected at two levels of difficulty — simple and complex — based on texture, instrument variety, presence of simultaneous musical lines, and clarity of internal repetition. All participants were significantly better at remembering novel music from their own culture than from an unfamiliar culture. Simple examples from both cultures were remembered significantly better than complex examples. Children performed as well as adults when remembering simple music from both cultures, whereas adults were better at remembering complex Western music. The results provide evidence that enculturation affects one's understanding of music structure before adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO TEST THE cross-cultural musical understanding of trained and untrained listeners from two distinct musical cultures by exploring the influence of enculturation on musical memory performance. Trained and untrained participants (N = 150) from the United States and Turkey listened to a series of novel musical excerpts from both familiar and unfamiliar cultures and then completed a recognition memory task for each set of examples. All participants were significantly better at remembering novel music from their native culture and there were no performance differences based on musical expertise. In addition, Turkish participants were better at remembering Western music, a familiar but nonnative musical culture, than Chinese music. The results suggest that our cognitive schemata for musical information are culturally derived and that enculturation influences musical memory at a structural level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]