This study analyzes infant vocal responses in order to determine whether infants exposed to both linguistic and musical stimuli exhibit different types of vocalizations in response to those two different kinds of stimulation. Twenty-one infants, from 9 to 11 months of age, were observed in four weekly sessions over the period of a month. Each session consisted of two presentations: musical, in which the experimenter sang, and linguistic, in which the experimenter narrated poems. Infants’ vocalizations were recorded and submitted to aural and acoustic analysis. The results showed that infants’ vocalizations in response to both presentations displayed different characteristics of duration and vocal extension. Infant vocalizations in response to musical stimuli consisted predominantly of isolated sounds, with a high percentage of first and third steps of the scale of the musical stimuli as well as a predominance of melodic intervals and contours outlining important scalar steps of the stimuli. Descending intervals were also a characteristic of infant vocal production in response to musical stimuli.
We compared infants' vocalizations produced both in singing and speaking conditions. In this study we collected the vocalizations of 12 infants aged between 12 and 24 months. Each 30-minute session integrated two stimulus conditions-speaking and singing. An acoustic analysis was developed in order to measure both segmental properties and melodic and rhythmic features. The results showed significant differences in the vocalizations to which the two stimulus conditions gave rise: in the duration of the vocalizations and the duration of the phonation, the number of nuclei and the duration of each nucleus present in the vocalizations. In particular, the greater extension of vowels in vocalizations in response to the singing condition seems to be distinctive from those produced in response to the speaking condition. This may reveal that there is a precocious distinction between the singing voice and the speaking voice. The acoustic analysis that we used shows promise in monitoring children's sequential singing development from early infancy onwards.
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