{"doi":"10.1111/desc.13438","title":"Music, a piece of many puzzles in developmental science","abstract":"When psychologist Sandra Trehub passed away in January 2023, many of her colleagues noted her role in putting music on psychologists' radar—especially research on music in development. Quoted in the New York Times, Laurel Trainor explained: “Back then, there were very few people in psychology and neuroscience who were studying music at all as a human behavior. Sandra said, look, music is universal, we spend a lot of time and energy on music. What is its purpose? Why do we do this?” (Whang, 2023). Writing on the Cognitive Development Society listserv, developmental scientists Roberta Golinkoff, Janet Werker, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, David Lewkowicz, and others echoed this view. Nearly a half-century has elapsed since Trehub's trailblazing papers on the foundations of music perception in infancy (Chang & Trehub, 1977a, 1977b; Trehub et al., 1984), which themselves built on foundational findings in speech perception (Eimas et al., 1971; Morse, 1972), including her own (Trehub, 1976). In that time, music research has influenced the course of nearly every domain of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. But the maturation of music perception research into a bona fide area of scientific inquiry, with transdicsiplinary ties in both basic and applied science, is not yet complete. Many psychology departments relegate the teaching of a “Psychology of Music” course to an adjunct instructor, or offer no instruction on the topic at all, for example. Music researchers often receive inquiries from students who open with “I'm writing you because there's no lab at my university where I can study music”. Despite its continuing marathon of high-profile discoveries, music is still not ubiquitous in academic psychology. We hope this Special Issue, “Music In Development”, will further music's establishment as a mainstream area of developmental science research. We received over sixty presubmission inquiries and are eager to present the resulting 15 articles in this collection. We hope you enjoy them. This issue shows that music can offer a window into many of the foundational puzzles of developmental science. This is evident from the breadth of developmental science research on music. We have findings on the impact of prenatal exposure to music on newborns’ neural responsivity to the fundamental frequency of speech stimuli (Arenillas-Alcón et al., 2023), a test of the complexity-grove relationship in children's dance (Cameron et al., 2023), and a measure of degree to which playing instruments asynchronously enhances children's perspective-taking skills (Wan et al., 2023). Imaging techniques help determine whether the infant cortex exhibits selective neural responses to music and speech (Kosakowski et al., 2023), and whether infant brain structure is related to subsequent music aptitude skills (Zuk et al., 2023). There is even a survey of the influence of different acoustic features on children's development of categories for speech and song (Vanden Bosch der Nederlanden et al., 2023). These and the other findings reported in this special issue showcase the wide range of developmental topics impacted by music. Further, the research published here documents mechanisms of music perception research, a key topic for developmentalists, highlighting overlaps and non-overlaps between the processes underlying music cognition as well as other domains. Based on data from animals, infants, and adults, as well as behavioral, hemodynamic, and electrophysiological measures, the results reported across this special issue detail a range of systematic relationships between variables. For example, Langus et al. (2023) ask whether early exposure to music and infant-directed language enhances infants' categorical perception of linguistic prominence. Paula et al. (2023) combine neural and behavioral measures with a music-listening intervention for infants at risk for developmental language and reading disorders, including dyslexia, and Lenc et al. (2023) relate early-developi","journal":"Developmental Science","year":2023,"id":409868,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9562,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":502942,"name":"Heather Bortfeld","orcid":"0000-0002-3545-5449","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":237931,"name":"Samuel A. Mehr","orcid":"0000-0002-9400-7718","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":78,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:21:31.144858Z","pmid":"37501524","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}