Preverbal infants often vocalize in emotionally loaded situations, yet the communicative potential of these vocalizations is not well understood. The aim of our study was to assess how accurately adult listeners extract information about the eliciting situation from infant preverbal vocalizations. Vocalizations of 19 infants aged 5-10 months were recorded in 3 negative (Pain, Isolation, Demand for Food) and 3 positive (Play, Reunion, After Feeding) situations. The recordings were later rated by 333 adult listeners on the scales of emotional valence and intensity. Subsequently, the listeners assigned the eliciting situations in a forced choice task. Listeners were almost perfectly able to discriminate whether a recording came from a negative or a positive situation. Their discrimination may have been based on perceived valence as they consistently assigned higher valence when listening to positive, and lower valence when listening to negative, recordings. Ability to identify the particular situation within the negative or positive realm was substantially weaker, with only three of the six situations being discriminated above chance. The best discriminated situation, Play, was associated with high perceived intensity. The weak qualitative discrimination of negative situations seemed to be based on graded perception of negative recordings, from the most intense and unpleasant (assigned to Pain) to the least intense and least unpleasant (assigned to Demand for Food). Parenthood and younger age, but not gender of listeners, had weak positive effects on the accuracy of judgments. Our results indicate that adults almost flawlessly distinguish positive and negative infant sounds, but are rather inaccurate regarding identification of the specific needs of the infant and may normally employ other sensory channels to gain this information.

Department of Ethology Institute of Animal Science Prague Czech Republic

Faculty of Humanities Charles University Prague Czech Republic; National Institute of Mental Health Klecany Czech Republic

Zobrazit více v PubMed

Gros-Louis J, West MJ, Goldstein MH, King AP. Mothers provide differential feedback to infants' prelinguistic sounds. Int J Behav Dev. 2006;30: 509–516.

Gros-Louis J, West MJ, King AP. Maternal responsiveness and the development of directed vocalizing in social interactions. Infancy. 2014;19: 385–408.

McCathren RB, Yoder PJ, Warren SF. The relationship between prelinguistic vocalization and later expressive vocabulary in young children with developmental delay. J Speech Lang Hear R. 1999;42: 915–924. PubMed

Reilly S, Eadie P, Bavin EL, Wake M, Prior M, Williams J, et al. Growth of infant communication between 8 and 12 months: a population study. J Paediatr Child Health. 2006;42: 764–770. PubMed

Keller H, Schölmerich A. Infant vocalizations and parental reactions during the first 4 months of life. Dev Psychol. 1987;23: 62–67.

Papoušek M. Early ontogeny of vocal communication in parent–infant interactions In: Papoušek H, Jürgens U, Papoušek M, editors. Nonverbal vocal communication: Comparative and developmental approaches. Studies in emotion and social interaction. New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press; 1992. pp. 230–261.

Scheiner E, Hammerschmidt K, Jürgens U, Zwirner P. Acoustic analyses of developmental changes and emotional expression in the preverbal vocalizations of infants. J Voice. 2002;16: 509–529. PubMed

Zeifman DM. An ethological analysis of human infant crying: Answering Tinbergen's four questions. Dev psychobiol. 2001;39: 265–285. PubMed

Wolff PH. The natural history of crying and other vocalizations in early infancy In: Foss BM, editor. Determinants of infant behavior. London: Methuen; 1969. Pp. 81–109.

Wasz-Hockert O, Partanen T, Vuorenkoski V, Valanne E, Michelsson K. Effect of training on ability to identify preverbal vocalizations. Dev Med Child Neurol. 1964;6: 397–402. PubMed

Muller E, Hollien H, Murray T. Perceptual responses to infant crying: Identification of cry types. J Child Lang. 1974;1: 89–95.

Wiesenfeld AR., Malatesta CZ, Deloach LL. Differential parental response to familiar and unfamiliar infant distress signals. Infant Beh Dev. 1981;4: 281–295.

Gustafson GE, Harris KL. Women's responses to young infants' cries. Dev Psychol. 1990;26: 144–152.

Ricks D. Making sense of experience to make sensible sounds In: Before speech: The beginning of interpersonal communication, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1979. pp. 245–268.

Papoušek M. Determinants of responsiveness to infant vocal expression of emotional state. Infant Beh Dev. 1989;12: 507–524.

Hollén LI, Manser MB. Motivation before meaning: Motivational information encoded in meerkat alarm calls develops earlier than referential information. Am Nat. 2007;169: 758–767. PubMed

Lingle S, Wyman MT, Kotrba R, Romanow CA. What makes a cry a cry? A review of infant distress vocalizations. Curr Zool. 2012;58: 698–726.

Tallet C, Špinka M, Maruščáková I, Šimeček P. Human perception of vocalizations of domestic piglets and modulation by experience with domestic pigs. J Comp Psychol. 2010;124: 81–91. 10.1037/a0017354 PubMed DOI

Tallet C, Linhart P, Policht R, Hammerschmidt K, Šimeček P, Kratinová P, et al. Encoding of situations in the vocal repertoire of piglets (Sus scrofa): A comparison of discrete and graded classifications. 2013; PLoS ONE, 8:e71841 10.1371/journal.pone.0071841 PubMed DOI PMC

Morton ES. On the occurrence and significance of motivation-structural rules in some bird and mammal sounds. Am Nat. 1977;111: 855–869.

Scheiner E, Fischer J. Emotion expression: The evolutionary heritage in the human voice In: Welsch W, Singer WJ, Wunder A, editors. Interdisciplinary anthropology. Springer Berlin; Heidelberg. 2011. pp. 105–129.

Mendl M, Burman OHP, Paul ES. An integrative and functional framework for the study of animal emotion and mood. P R Soc B. 2010;277: 2895–2904. 10.1098/rspb.2010.0303 PubMed DOI PMC

Gogoleva SS, Volodin IA, Volodina EV, Kharlamova AV, Trut LN. Sign and strength of emotional arousal: Vocal correlates of positive and negative attitudes to humans in silver foxes (Vulpes Vulpes). Behaviour. 2010;147: 1713–1736.

Briefer EF. Vocal expression of emotions in mammals: mechanisms of production and evidence. J Zool. 2012;288: 1–20.

Zeskind PS, Marshall TR The relation between variations in pitch and maternal perceptions of infant crying. Child Dev. 1988; 193–196.

Gustafson GE, Green JA. On the importance of fundamental frequency and other acoustic features in cry perception and infant development. Child Dev. 1989; 772–780. PubMed

Dessureau BK, Kurowski CO, Thompson NS. A reassessment of the role of pitch and duration in adults' responses to infant crying. Infant Beh Dev. 1998;21: 367–371.

Leger DW, Thompson RA, Merritt JA, Benz JJ. Adult perception of emotion intensity in human infant cries: Effects of infant age and cry acoustics. Child Dev. 1996;67: 3238–3249. PubMed

Belin P, Fecteau S, Charest I, Nicastro N, Hauser M, Armony J. Human cerebral response to animal affective vocalizations. P R Soc B. 2008;275: 473–481. PubMed PMC

Faragó T, Pongrácz P, Range F, Virányi Z, Miklósi A. 'The bone is mine': Affective and referential aspects of dog growls. Anim Behav. 2010;79: 917–925.

Maruščáková IL, Linhart P, Reby D, Ratcliffe VF, Špinka M. Cross-species judgement of emotional content of vocalizations: effects of call features and listeners’ personality, empathy and attitude toward animals on perception of piglet (Sus scrofa domestica) calls. J Comp Psychol. 2015; In revision. PubMed

Stark RE. Stages of speech development in the first year of life In: Yeni-Komshian GH, Kavanagh JF, Ferguson CA, editors. Child Phonology. New York, NY: Academic Press; 1980. pp. 73–92.

Wolff P. The natural history of crying and other vocalizations in early infancy In: Foss BM, editor. London: Methuen, Determinants of infant behavior. 1969. pp. 81–109.

Murray AD. Infant crying as an elicitor of parental behavior: An examination of two models. Psychol Bull. 1979;86: 191–215. PubMed

Holden GW. Adults' thinking about a child-rearing problem: Effects of experience, parental status, and gender. Child Dev. 1988;59: 1623–1632.

Gustafsson E, Levrero F, Réby D, Mathevon N. Fathers are just as good as mothers at recognizing the cries of their baby. Nat Commun. 2013;4:1698 10.1038/ncomms2713 PubMed DOI

Sánchez SM, Ziegler TE, Snowdon CT. Both parents respond equally to infant cues in the cooperatively breeding common marmoset, Callithrix jacchus . Anim Behav. 2014;97: 95–103. PubMed PMC

Darwin C. The expression of the emotions in man and animals London: John Murray; 1872.

August PV, Anderson JGT. Mammal sounds and motivation-structural rules—a test of the hypothesis. J Mammal. 1987;68: 1–9.

Faragó T, Andics A, Devecseri V, Kis A, Gácsi M, Miklósi Á. Humans rely on the same rules to assess emotional valence and intensity in conspecific and dog vocalizations. Biol Lett. 2014;10: 20130926 10.1098/rsbl.2013.0926 PubMed DOI PMC

Lingle S, Riede T. Deer mothers are sensitive to infant distress vocalizations of diverse mammalian species. Amer Naturalist. 2014;184: 510–522. 10.1086/677677 PubMed DOI

Parsons CE, Young KS, Parsons E, Stein A, Kringelbach ML. Listening to infant distress vocalizations enhances effortful motor performance. Acta paediatr. 2012;101(4), e189 10.1111/j.1651-2227.2011.02554.x PubMed DOI

Roar of a Champion: Loudness and Voice Pitch Predict Perceived Fighting Ability but Not Success in MMA Fighters