Search

Parents commonly vocalize to infants to mitigate their distress, especially when holding them is not possible. Here we examined the relative efficacy of parents' speech and singing (familiar and unfamiliar songs) in alleviating the distress of 8- and 10-month-old infants ( n = 68 per age group). Parent-infant dyads participated in 3 trials of the Still Face procedure, featuring a 2-min Play Phase, a Still Face phase (parents immobile and unresponsive for 1 min or until infants became visibly distressed), and a 2-min Reunion Phase in which caregivers attempted to reverse infant distress by (a) singing a highly familiar song, (b) singing an unfamiliar song, or (c) expressive talking (order counterbalanced across dyads). In the Reunion Phase, talking led to increased negative affect in both age groups, in contrast to singing familiar or unfamiliar songs, which increased infant attention to parent and decreased negative affect. The favorable consequences were greatest for familiar songs, which also generated increased smiling. Skin conductance recorded from a subset of infants ( n = 36 younger, 41 older infants) revealed that arousal levels were highest for the talking reunion, lowest for unfamiliar songs, and intermediate for familiar songs. The arousal effects, considered in conjunction with the behavioral effects, confirm that songs are more effective than speech at mitigating infant distress. We suggest, moreover, that familiar songs generate higher infant arousal than unfamiliar songs because they evoke excitement, reflected in modestly elevated arousal as well as pleasure, in contrast to more subdued responses to unfamiliar songs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Little is known about infants' perception of cross-modal cues to identity, but the importance of recognizing familiar individuals makes it likely that this skill would be evident early in life. Infants 6-8 months of age were tested on their ability to link dynamic cross-modal cues to the identity of unfamiliar speakers and singers. After exposure to speech or singing, infants watched two silent videos, one featuring the previously heard speaker or singer. Infants looked significantly longer at the video of the person heard previously, which indicates that they can match auditory and visual cues to the identity of unfamiliar persons.

The purpose of the present investigation was to determine whether mothers use discernible tunes (i.e., specific interval sequences) in their speech to infants and whether such tunes are individually distinctive. Mothers were recorded speaking with their infants on two occasions separated by 1 week or more. Examination of the tunes of each mother revealed discernible tunes and frequent repetitions of tunes within and across sessions. Comparisons of utterances with the most common pitch contour (i.e., rising), both within and across mothers, revealed interval patterns that were individually distinctive, or unique. The findings confirm the prominence of tunes and the presence of signature tunes in maternal speech to infants.

We examined the relative stability of pitch, tempo, and rhythm in maternal speech and singing to prelinguistic infants. Mothers were recorded speaking and singing to their infants on two occasions separated by 1 week or more. The pitch level and tempo of identical utterances were highly variable across the 1-week period, but these features were virtually unchanged in song repetitions. Rhythmic patterning was largely maintained in speech, as in song. Mothers' accurate reproduction of their sung performances can be considered a form of absolute pitch and absolute tempo.

Explored in three experiments children's understanding of emotion in speech. Found gradual developmental change from 4-year-olds' focus on content to adult's focus on paralanguage. Children exhibited greater response latencies to utterances with conflicting cues than to those with nonconflicting cues. They accurately labeled affective paralanguage when propositional emotion cues were obscured by foreign language or by low-pass filtering. (Author/KB)

When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations across cultures. We collected 1,615 recordings of infant- and adult-directed speech and song produced by 410 people in 21 urban, rural and small-scale societies. Infant-directedness was reliably classified from acoustic features only, with acoustic profiles of infant-directedness differing across language and music but in consistent fashions. We then studied listener sensitivity to these acoustic features. We played the recordings to 51,065 people from 187 countries, recruited via an English-language website, who guessed whether each vocalization was infant-directed. Their intuitions were more accurate than chance, predictable in part by common sets of acoustic features and robust to the effects of linguistic relatedness between vocalizer and listener. These findings inform hypotheses of the psychological functions and evolution of human communication.

This study investigates the oral gestures of 8-month-old infants in response to audiovisual presentation of lip and tongue smacks. Infants exhibited more lip gestures than tongue gestures following adult lip smacks and more tongue gestures than lip gestures following adult tongue smacks. The findings, which are consistent with predictions from Articulatory Phonology, imply that 8-month-old infants are capable of producing goal-directed oral gestures by matching the articulatory organ of an adult model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examined the influence of infant visual cues on maternal vocal and facial expressiveness while speaking or singing and the influence of maternal visual cues on infant attention. Experiment 1 asked whether mothers exhibit more vocal emotion when speaking and singing to infants in or out of view. Adults judged which of each pair of audio excerpts (in view, out of view) sounded more emotional. Face-to-face vocalizations were judged more emotional than vocalizations to infants out of view. Moreover, mothers smiled considerably more while singing than while speaking to infants. Experiment 2 examined the influence of video feedback from infants on maternal speech and singing. Maternal vocalizations in the context of video feedback were judged to be less emotional than those in face-to-face contexts but more emotional than those in out-of-view contexts. Experiment 3 compared six-month-old infants' attention to maternal speech and singing with audio-only versions or with silent video-only versions. Infants exhibited comparable attention to audio-only versions of speech and singing but greater attention to video-only versions of singing. The present investigation is unique in documenting the contribution of infant visual feedback to maternal vocal emotion in contexts that control for infants' presence, visibility, and proximity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The available evidence indicates that the music of a culture reflects the speech rhythm of the prevailing language. The normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) is a measure of durational contrast between successive events that can be applied to vowels in speech and to notes in music. Music-language parallels may have implications for the acquisition of language and music, but it is unclear whether native-language rhythms are reflected in children's songs. In general, children's songs exhibit greater rhythmic regularity than adults' songs, in line with their caregiving goals and frequent coordination with rhythmic movement. Accordingly, one might expect lower nPVI values (i.e., lower variability) for such songs regardless of culture. In addition to their caregiving goals, children's songs may serve an intuitive didactic function by modeling culturally relevant content and structure for music and language. One might therefore expect pronounced rhythmic parallels between children's songs and language of origin. To evaluate these predictions, we analyzed a corpus of 269 English and French songs from folk and children's music anthologies. As in prior work, nPVI values were significantly higher for English than for French children's songs. For folk songs (i.e., songs not for children), the difference in nPVI for English and French songs was small and in the expected direction but non-significant. We subsequently collected ratings from American and French monolingual and bilingual adults, who rated their familiarity with each song, how much they liked it, and whether or not they thought it was a children's song. Listeners gave higher familiarity and liking ratings to songs from their own culture, and they gave higher familiarity and preference ratings to children's songs than to other songs. Although higher child-directedness ratings were given to children's than to folk songs, French listeners drove this effect, and their ratings were uniquely predicted by nPVI. Together, these findings suggest that language-based rhythmic structures are evident in children's songs, and that listeners expect exaggerated language-based rhythms in children's songs. The implications of these findings for enculturation processes and for the acquisition of music and language are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much is known about the efficacy of infant-directed ( ID) speech and singing for capturing attention, but little is known about their role in regulating affect. In Experiment 1, infants 7-10 months of age listened to scripted recordings of ID speech, adult-directed speech, or singing in an unfamiliar language (Turkish) until they met a criterion of distress based on negative facial expression. They listened to singing for roughly twice as long as speech before meeting the distress criterion. In Experiment 2, they were exposed to natural recordings of ID speech or singing in a familiar language. As in Experiment 1, ID singing was considerably more effective than speech for delaying the onset of distress. We suggest that the temporal patterning of ID singing, with its regular beat, metrical organization, and tempo, plays an important role in inhibiting distress, perhaps by promoting entrainment and predictive listening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adolescents and adults commonly use music for various forms of affect regulation, including relaxation, revitalization, distraction, and elicitation of pleasant memories. Mothers throughout the world also sing to their infants, with affect regulation as the principal goal. To date, the study of maternal singing has focused largely on its acoustic features and its consequences for infant attention. We describe recent laboratory research that explores the consequences of singing for infant affect regulation. Such work reveals that listening to recordings of play songs can maintain 6- to 9-month-old infants in a relatively contented or neutral state considerably longer than recordings of infant-directed or adult-directed speech. When 10-month-old infants fuss or cry and are highly aroused, mothers' multimodal singing is more effective than maternal speech at inducing recovery from such distress. Moreover, play songs are more effective than lullabies at reducing arousal in Western infants. We explore the implications of these findings along with possible practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This study examined the ability of prelingually deaf children with bilateral implants to identify emotion (i.e. happiness or sadness) in speech and music. Methods: Participants in Experiment 1 were 14 prelingually deaf children from 5-7 years of age who had bilateral implants and 18 normally hearing children from 4-6 years of age. They judged whether linguistically neutral utterances produced by a man and woman sounded happy or sad. Participants in Experiment 2 were 14 bilateral implant users from 4-6 years of age and the same normally hearing children as in Experiment 1. They judged whether synthesized piano excerpts sounded happy or sad. Results: Child implant users' accuracy of identifying happiness and sadness in speech was well above chance levels but significantly below the accuracy achieved by children with normal hearing. Similarly, their accuracy of identifying happiness and sadness in music was well above chance levels but significantly below that of children with normal hearing, who performed at ceiling. For the 12 implant users who participated in both experiments, performance on the speech task correlated significantly with performance on the music task and implant experience was correlated with performance on both tasks. Discussion: Child implant users' accurate identification of emotion in speech exceeded performance in previous studies, which may be attributable to fewer response alternatives and the use of child-directed speech. Moreover, child implant users' successful identification of emotion in music indicates that the relevant cues are accessible at a relatively young age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese 5- to 13-yr-olds who used cochlear implants (CIs) and a comparison group of normally hearing (NH) Japanese children were tested on their perception and production of speech prosody. For the perception task, they were required to judge whether semantically neutral utterances that were normalized for amplitude were spoken in a happy, sad, or angry manner. The performance of NH children was error-free. By contrast, child CI users performed well below ceiling but above chance levels on happy- and sad-sounding utterances but not on angry-sounding utterances. For the production task, children were required to imitate stereotyped Japanese utterances expressing disappointment and surprise as well as culturally typically representations of crow and cat sounds. NH 5- and 6-year-olds produced significantly poorer imitations than older hearing children, but age was unrelated to the imitation quality of child CI users. Overall, child CI user's imitations were significantly poorer than those of NH children, but they did not differ significantly from the imitations of the youngest NH group. Moreover, there was a robust correlation between the performance of child CI users on the perception and production tasks; this implies that difficulties with prosodic perception underlie their difficulties with prosodic imitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Infants who were 6 months of age were presented with extended audiovisual episodes of their mother''s infant-directed speech or singing. Cumulative visual fixation and initial fixation of the mother''s image were longer for maternal singing than for maternal speech. Moreover, movement reduction, which may signal intense engagement, accompanied visual fixation more frequently for maternal singing than for maternal speech. The stereotypy and repetitiveness of maternal singing may promote moderate arousal levels, which sustain infant attention, in contrast to the greater variability of speech, which may result in cycles of heightened arousal, gaze aversion, and re-engagement. The regular pulse of music may also enhance emotional coordination between mother and infant. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

When utterances contain conflicting emotion cues, 6-year-olds judge emotion from content, even when instructed to judge emotion from paralanguage (Morton & Trehub, 2001). Two experiments examined the nature of this bias. In Experiment 1, priming paralanguage reversed 6-year-olds' normal bias to content. In Experiment 2, 6-year-olds were instructed to listen to paralanguage under various conditions. Children were more likely to follow instructions delivered with feedback than instructions delivered alone. Children who described conflicts between content and paralanguage were more likely to follow instructions than children who did not describe these conflicts. Results suggest that 6-year-olds can judge emotion from paralanguage in the presence of competing content but often remain focused on content because of the way they represent the instructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]