JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL CHILD PSYCHOLOGY 24, 324-331 (1977) Auditory Processing of Relational Information by Young Infants HSING-WU CHANGAND~ANDRA E. TREHUB Cinirersit~ of T~won/o. C‘mado The ability of 5-month-old infants to process relational information was assessed by means of a habituation-dishabituation paradigm with cardiac deceleration as the response measure. Infants were first habituated to a six-tone pattern and then shifted either to a transposition of the standard pattern or to a control pattern which comprised the elements of the transposed pattern in scrambled order. Dishabituation was not evident in the case of the transposed group but was clearly evident for the control group. These results indicate that infants can process relational information from tonal patterns. Our environment consists of various kinds of patterned stimulation which alter their physical properties over time in the case of auditory stimuli and over space in the case of visual stimuli. When a patterned stimulus is processed as an integrated structure or gestalt this presumably provides richer information about the environment compared to the serial processing of the stimulus elements without regard to their relations within the configuration. Given the advantages inherent in a holistic manner of pattern processing, it would appear reasonable for such abilities to be built into the human perceptual system or, at the least, to develop at an early age. In fact. evidence for gestalt processing of certain visual patterns has been reported for young infants (Bower, 1965, 1967, 1974). However, no definitive evidence has yet been adduced with respect to the auditory realm. Several investigators (Kinney & Kagan, 1976; McCall & Melson, 1970: Melson & McCall, 1970) have claimed that infants can discriminate between multitone patterns but in each of these studies the stimuli em- bodied a contrasting initial tone. raising the possibility that only the first tone rather than the tonal configuration had been processed. Horowitz (1972), arguing against a holistic view of infant pattern perception. has This research was supported by National Research Council of Canada Grant A9956 to Sandra E. Trehub and by a Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship to Hsing-Wu Chang. The paper is based upon data collected as part of the senior author‘s dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D degree. The authors thank Dr. D. Creelman for providing facilities for the generation of stimulus material and Cosette Wilson for her efforts in recruiting subjects. Requests for reprints should be sent to Sandra E. Trehub. Centre for Research in Human Development, Erindale College, University of Toronto. Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5L lC6.