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SUMMARY:Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cu
 ltures - Courtney Hilton & Cody Moser\; Harvard University\, Department of
  Psychology
DTSTART:20220201T170000Z
DTEND:20220201T180000Z
UID:TALK169232@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Xi Zhang
DESCRIPTION:Across taxa\, the forms of vocal signals are shaped by their f
 unctions. In humans\, a salient context of vocal signaling is infant care\
 , as human infants are altricial. Humans often produce “parent-ese”\, 
 speech and song for infants that differ acoustically from ordinary speech 
 and song\, in fashions that are thought to support parent-infant communica
 tion and infant language learning\; modulate infant affect\; or credibly s
 ignal information to infants. These theories predict a universal form-func
 tion link in infant-directed vocalizations\, with consistent differentiati
 on between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations across culture
 s. Some evidence supports this prediction\, but the limited generalizabili
 ty of individual ethnographic reports and laboratory experiments and small
  stimulus sets\, along with intriguing reports of counterexamples\, leave 
 the question open. Here\, we show that infant-directed speech and song are
  robustly differentiable from their adult-directed counterparts\, within v
 oices and across cultures. We built a corpus of 1615 recordings of infant-
  and adult-directed singing and speech produced by 410 people living in 21
  urban\, rural\, and small-scale societies and played the recordings to 45
 \,745 people recruited online from many countries. We asked them to guess 
 whether or not each vocalization was\, in fact\, infant-directed. The patt
 erns of inferences of these naïve listeners\, supported by acoustic analy
 ses and predictive modelling\, demonstrate acoustic cues to infant-directe
 dness that are cross-culturally robust. The cues to infant-directedness di
 ffer across language and music\, however\, informing hypotheses of the psy
 chological functions and evolution of both.
LOCATION:CMS Computer Room\, Faculty of Music (11 West Road\, Cambridge\, 
 CB3 9DP)\; Join Zoom Meeting at https://cam-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/91530257826?pw
 d=aXIvL2FENzVLNndybUp0Vnprcm1adz09 Meeting ID: 915 3025 7826 Passcode: 355
 624
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