Melody complexity of infants' cry and non-cry vocalisations increases across the first six months.

ABSTRACT: In early infancy, melody provides the most salient prosodic element for language acquisition and there is huge evidence for infants' precocious aptitudes for musical and speech melody perception. Yet, a lack of knowledge remains with respect to melody patterns of infants' vocalisations. In a search for developmental regularities of cry and non-cry vocalisations and for building blocks of prosody (intonation) over the first 6 months of life, more than 67,500 melodies (fundamental frequency contours) of 277 healthy infants from monolingual German families were quantitatively analysed. Based on objective criteria, vocalisations with well-identifiable melodies were grouped into those exhibiting a simple (single-arc) or complex (multiple-arc) melody pattern. Longitudinal analysis using fraction

SUBMITTER: Wermke K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7893022 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature