Adult perceptions of vocalizing infants

Bloom, Kathleen; Lo, Elsa

doi:10.1016/0163-6383(90)90031-3

Cited by 57 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Similarly, describing an infant as premature versus being a term baby influenced not only ratings of crying in parents but also physiological measures [Frodi, 1985]. In line with this, infants described as high versus low attractive received higher preference ratings from parents and nonparents especially in combination with syllabic sounds [Bloom and Lo, 1990]. The latter points to a further mediating variable, namely, differences related to the infant stimuli themselves.…”

Section: Influence Of Listener's Gender On Brain Areas Of Activationmentioning

confidence: 88%

FMRI activations of amygdala, cingulate cortex, and auditory cortex by infant laughing and crying

Sander¹,

Frome²,

Scheich³

2007

Human Brain Mapping

112

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

One of the functions of emotional vocalizations is the regulation of social relationships like those between adults and children. Listening to infant vocalizations is known to engage amygdala as well as anterior and posterior cingulate cortices. But, the functional relationships between these structures still need further clarification. Here, nonparental women and men listened to laughing and crying of preverbal infants and to vocalization-derived control stimuli, while performing a pure tone detection task during low-noise functional magnetic resonance imaging. Infant vocalizations elicited stronger activation in amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) of women, whereas the alienated control stimuli elicited stronger activation in men. Independent of listeners' gender, auditory cortex (AC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) were more strongly activated by the control stimuli than by infant laughing or crying. The gender-dependent correlates of neural activity in amygdala and ACC may reflect neural predispositions in women for responses to preverbal infant vocalizations, whereas the gender-independent similarity of activation patterns in PCC and AC may reflect more sensory-based and cognitive levels of neural processing. In comparison to our previous work on adult laughing and crying, the infant vocalizations elicited manifold higher amygdala activation.

show abstract

Section: Influence Of Listener's Gender On Brain Areas Of Activationmentioning

confidence: 88%

FMRI activations of amygdala, cingulate cortex, and auditory cortex by infant laughing and crying

Sander¹,

Frome²,

Scheich³

2007

Human Brain Mapping

112

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In other words, the infants' own voices were not dubbed into their video segment. For the rst set of eight infants, syllabic sound episodes were dubbed for two random ly chosen mouth-moving and two random ly chosen mouth-nonmoving infants, and vocalic sounds were dubbed for the remaining four infants (for descriptions of syllabic and vocalic sound categories see Bloom, 1988;Bloom & Lo, 1990or Bloom, Russell, & Wassenberg, 1987. In their second appearance, infants who had "produced" syllabic sounds now "produced" vocalic sounds, and conversely.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This questionnaire has been used and evaluated in previous studies (e.g. Bloom, 1993;Bloom, D'Odorico, & Beaumont, 1993;Bloom & Lo, 1990). The questionnaire was preceded by the following instructions: "After viewing each infant, please circle the number that corresponds to your feelings about that infant.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Japanese and Canadian Impressions of Vocalising Infants

Bloom¹

1996

International Journal of Behavioral Development

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Canadian adults use cues that are part of adult speech (voice quality and mouth movements) to create perceptions of prelinguistic, 3-month-old infants as communicative partners. To what degree do cultural differences modulate social attributions of infants? It is thought that Japanese pay less attention to the visual cues that accompany speech, and so we hypothesised that, compared with Canadians, Japanese adults would be less likely to use mouth movement cues, but equally likely to use voice cues, in forming social perceptions of infants. To test this hypothesis, a video tape of 3-month-old, vocalising infants was presented to three (n 5 25) groups of adults in Japan and in Canada. The tape was constructed with dubbing so that all combinations of acoustic (syllabic/vocali c) and visual (mouth moving/not moving) conditions were represented. The conditions of tape presentation differed for the three groups in each nation: Audio/Video, Audio-only, Video-only. Infants were rated on characteristics of social favourability and communicative intent. In the absence of audio cues (Video-only group), adult ratings were in uenced by the infant's mouth movements and by the adult's culture. Although both Canadians and Japanese gave higher ratings of social favourability and communicative intent to infants whose mouths moved, the preference for mouth movement was signi cantly weaker for Japanese. The fact that Japanese paid less attention to features of the mouth of the infant is consistent with past cross-cultura l research and with the minor role of facial cues in Japanese Sign Language. Our research demonstrated that adults apply cultural rules of adult conversation when responding to preverbal infants.

show abstract

“…Studies indicate that infants who produce a high rate of syllables per utterance are considered more pleasant, friendly, and likeable than infants who vocalize less complexly (Bloom, D'Odorico, & Beaumont, 1993;Bloom & Lo, 1990). When infants invent and use novel phonetic forms it appears to please parents, who incorporate them into their own speech.…”

Section: The First Negotiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emancipation of the voice: Vocal complexity as a fitness indicator

Locke

2016

Psychon Bull Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Although language is generally spoken, most evolutionary proposals say little about any changes that may have induced vocal control. Here I suggest that the interaction of two changes in our species-one in sociality, the other in life history-liberated the voice from its affective moorings, enabling it to serve as a fitness cue or signal. The modification of life history increased the helplessness of infants, thus their competition for care, pressuring them to emit, and parents (and others) to evaluate, new vocal cues in bids for attention. This change elaborated and formalized the care communication system that was used in infancy and, because of parental adoption of social criteria, extended it into childhood, supporting the extrafamilial relationships that intensify in those stages. The remodeling of life history, in conjunction with intensified sociality, also enhanced vocal signaling in adolescence-a second stage that is unique to humans-and adulthood. Building on the new vocal skills and fitness criteria that emerged earlier, I claim that males with ornamented speech enjoyed advantages in their pursuit of dominance and reproductive opportunities in evolutionary history, as they do today. There are implications of this scenario for the mechanistic level of vocal diversification. Today, intentionality plays a role both in the instrumental crying of infants and the modulated vocalizations of adults. In evolutionary history, I claim that in both cases, spontaneously emitted behavioral cues elicited perceptible responses, giving rise to strategic signals that were sent, and processed, under a new and fundamentally different neural regime.

show abstract

Adult perceptions of vocalizing infants

Cited by 57 publications

References 20 publications

FMRI activations of amygdala, cingulate cortex, and auditory cortex by infant laughing and crying

FMRI activations of amygdala, cingulate cortex, and auditory cortex by infant laughing and crying

Japanese and Canadian Impressions of Vocalising Infants

Emancipation of the voice: Vocal complexity as a fitness indicator

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About