Young children's difficulties in switching from rhythm production to temporal interval production (>1 s)
Résumé
In order to efficiently perform audio-motor coordination children must process event duration. It has recently been shown that duration processing in adults involves two distinct, or at least hierarchically interrelated, processes. The processing of durations ranging from a hundred milliseconds to around one second is well accounted for by the Scalar Timing Theory. For duration above one second, temporal processing in adults appears to be task-dependent. Performances in the range of a hundred millisecond durations are usually studied with auditory tempo tasks. In this study, we examine timing performance in children for a large range of durations, from 400 ms to 4 seconds, using the same experimental design. The procedure consists in a motor synchronization task. Overall, our results show that 5 year olds perform better than 3 year olds. However, durations greater than, 1500 ms are difficult to process, leading to increasing variability in produced intervals. Moreover, only a few children are able to produce very long duration intervals. The main finding of this study confirms the existence of a break in the region of 1500 ms when a repeated synchronization task is tested. Consistently with the adult literature, this finding suggests the existence of two duration-dependent timing processes when children have to coordinate their motor behavior to external events
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