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Acoustic regularities in infant-directed vocalizations across cultures

Cody J. Moser, Harry Lee-Rubin, Constance M. Bainbridge, S. Atwood, Jan Simson, Dean Knox, Luke Glowacki, Andrzej Galbarczyk, Grazyna Jasienska, Cody T. Ross, Mary Beth Neff, Alia Martin, Laura K. Cirelli, Sandra E. Trehub, Jinqi Song, Minju Kim, Adena Schachner, Tom A. Vardy, Quentin D. Atkinson, Jan Antfolk, Purnima Madhivanan, Anand Siddaiah, Caitlyn D. Placek, Gul Deniz Salali, Sarai Keestra, Manvir Singh, Scott A. Collins, John Q. Patton, Camila Scaff, Jonathan Stieglitz, Cristina Moya, Rohan R. Sagar, Brian M. Wood, Max M. Krasnow, View ORCID ProfileSamuel A. Mehr
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.09.032995
Cody J. Moser
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
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  • For correspondence: cmoser@g.harvard.edu sam@wjh.harvard.edu
Harry Lee-Rubin
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
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Constance M. Bainbridge
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
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S. Atwood
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
2Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105, USA
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Jan Simson
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
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Dean Knox
3Department of Politics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
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Luke Glowacki
4Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA
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Andrzej Galbarczyk
5Department of Environmental Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, Jagiellonian University Medical College, 31-531 Krakow, Poland
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Grazyna Jasienska
5Department of Environmental Health, Faculty of Health Sciences, Jagiellonian University Medical College, 31-531 Krakow, Poland
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Cody T. Ross
6Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
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Mary Beth Neff
7School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6012, New Zealand
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Alia Martin
7School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6012, New Zealand
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Laura K. Cirelli
8Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, Ontario M1C 1A4, Canada
9Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada
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Sandra E. Trehub
9Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario L5L 1C6, Canada
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Jinqi Song
10Department of Mathematics, Univesity of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
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Minju Kim
11Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, USA
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Adena Schachner
11Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, USA
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Tom A. Vardy
12School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand
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Quentin D. Atkinson
12School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand
13Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, D-07745 Jena, Germany
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Jan Antfolk
14Department of Psychology, Åbo Akademi, 20500 Turku, Finland
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Purnima Madhivanan
15Department of Health Promotion Sciences, Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85724, USA
16Division of Infectious Diseases, College of Medicine, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85724, USA
17Department of Family & Community Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85724, USA
18Public Health Research Institute of India, Yadavgiri, Mysore 560020, India
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Anand Siddaiah
19Department Of Epidemiology, Stempel School Of Public Health, Florida International University, Miami, FL 33157, USA
20Public Health Research Institute of India, Mysuru 570020, India
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Caitlyn D. Placek
21Department of Anthropology, Ball State University, Muncie, IN 47306, USA
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Gul Deniz Salali
22Department of Anthropology, University College London, WC1H 0BW London, UK
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Sarai Keestra
22Department of Anthropology, University College London, WC1H 0BW London, UK
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Manvir Singh
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
23Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
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Scott A. Collins
24School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281, USA
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John Q. Patton
25Division of Anthropology, California State University, Fullerton, CA 92831, USA
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Camila Scaff
26Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich, 8006 Zürich, Switzerland
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Jonathan Stieglitz
27Université Toulouse 1 Capitole, 31080 Toulouse Cedex 6, France
28Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, 31080 Toulouse Cedex 6, France
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Cristina Moya
29Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA
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Rohan R. Sagar
30Future Generations University, Circle Ville, WV 26807, USA
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Brian M. Wood
31Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
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Max M. Krasnow
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
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Samuel A. Mehr
1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
7School of Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington 6012, New Zealand
32Data Science Initiative, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
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  • ORCID record for Samuel A. Mehr
  • For correspondence: cmoser@g.harvard.edu sam@wjh.harvard.edu
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Abstract

Humans often produce vocalizations for infants that differ from vocalizations for adults. Is this property common across societies? The forms of infant-directed vocalizations may be shaped by their function in parent-infant communication. If so, infant-directed song and speech should be differentiable from adult-directed song and speech on the basis of their acoustic features, and this property should be relatively invariant across cultures. To test this hypothesis, we built a corpus of 1,614 recordings of infant- and adult-directed singing and speech produced by 411 people living in 21 urban, rural, and small-scale societies. We studied the corpus in a massive online experiment and in a series of acoustic analyses. Naïve listeners (N = 13,218) reliably identified infant-directed vocalizations as infant-directed, and adult-directed speech (but not songs) as adult-directed, at rates far higher than chance. Ratings of infant-directed song were the most accurate and the most consistent across all societies; infant-directed speech was accurately identified on average, but inconsistently across societies. To determine the mechanisms underlying these results, we extracted many acoustic features from each recording and identified those that most reliably characterize infant-directed song and speech across cultures, via preregistered exploratory-confirmatory analyses and machine classification. The features distinguishing infant- and adult-directed song and speech concerned pitch, rhythmic, phonetic, and timbral attributes; a hypothesis-free classifier with cross-validation across societies reliably identified all vocalization types, with highest accuracy for infant-directed song. Last, we isolated 12 acoustic features that were predictive of perceived infant-directedness; of these, two pitch attributes (median F0 and its variability) were by far the most explanatory. These findings demonstrate cross-cultural regularities in infant-directed vocalizations that are suggestive of universality; moreover, infant-directed song appears to be more cross-culturally stereotyped than infant-directed speech, informing hypotheses of the functions and evolution of both.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • https://osf.io/jcbq9/

  • https://github.com/themusiclab/infant-vocal

  • https://themusiclab.org/quizzes/ids

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Acoustic regularities in infant-directed vocalizations across cultures
Cody J. Moser, Harry Lee-Rubin, Constance M. Bainbridge, S. Atwood, Jan Simson, Dean Knox, Luke Glowacki, Andrzej Galbarczyk, Grazyna Jasienska, Cody T. Ross, Mary Beth Neff, Alia Martin, Laura K. Cirelli, Sandra E. Trehub, Jinqi Song, Minju Kim, Adena Schachner, Tom A. Vardy, Quentin D. Atkinson, Jan Antfolk, Purnima Madhivanan, Anand Siddaiah, Caitlyn D. Placek, Gul Deniz Salali, Sarai Keestra, Manvir Singh, Scott A. Collins, John Q. Patton, Camila Scaff, Jonathan Stieglitz, Cristina Moya, Rohan R. Sagar, Brian M. Wood, Max M. Krasnow, Samuel A. Mehr
bioRxiv 2020.04.09.032995; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.09.032995
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Acoustic regularities in infant-directed vocalizations across cultures
Cody J. Moser, Harry Lee-Rubin, Constance M. Bainbridge, S. Atwood, Jan Simson, Dean Knox, Luke Glowacki, Andrzej Galbarczyk, Grazyna Jasienska, Cody T. Ross, Mary Beth Neff, Alia Martin, Laura K. Cirelli, Sandra E. Trehub, Jinqi Song, Minju Kim, Adena Schachner, Tom A. Vardy, Quentin D. Atkinson, Jan Antfolk, Purnima Madhivanan, Anand Siddaiah, Caitlyn D. Placek, Gul Deniz Salali, Sarai Keestra, Manvir Singh, Scott A. Collins, John Q. Patton, Camila Scaff, Jonathan Stieglitz, Cristina Moya, Rohan R. Sagar, Brian M. Wood, Max M. Krasnow, Samuel A. Mehr
bioRxiv 2020.04.09.032995; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.09.032995

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