Automated analysis of newborn cry: relationships between melodic shapes and native language

Manfredi, Claudia; Viellevoye, Renaud; Orlandi, Silvia; Torres-García, Alejandro A.; Pieraccini, Giuseppe; Reyes-García, Carlos A.

doi:10.1016/j.bspc.2019.101561

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…The authors found that the melodic contour of the cry patterns of French and German newborns differed and that each group showed patterns reflecting the speech prosody of their native language, that is, prominence-initial in German and prominence-final in French. While the statistical analyses in this study were criticized (Gustafson et al 2017), in subsequent work, a machine learning algorithm successfully classified newborn cries from three different languages (Manfredi et al 2019), suggesting that the cries are sufficiently discriminable. Further work is needed to firmly establish the impact of prenatal experience on production, but if it is confirmed, it constitutes particularly strong evidence that attunement to the native language starts in utero.…”

Section: Speech Perception Abilities Shaped By Prenatal Experiencementioning

confidence: 89%

Neurodevelopmental Preparedness for Language in the Neonatal Brain

Nallet

Gervain

2021

Annu. Rev. Dev. Psychol.

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Neonates show broad-based, universal speech perception abilities, allowing them to acquire any language. Moreover, an increasing body of research shows that prenatal experience with speech, which is a low-pass signal mainly preserving prosody, already shapes those abilities. In this review, we first provide a summary of the empirical evidence available today on newborns’ universal and experience-modulated speech perception abilities. We then interpret these findings in a new framework, focusing on the role of the prenatal prosodic experience in speech perception development. We argue that the chronological sequence of infants’ experience with speech, starting before birth with a low-pass filtered signal and continuing with the full-band signal after birth, sets up the prosodic hierarchy and a cascade of embedded neural oscillations as its brain correlate, laying the foundations for language acquisition. Prosody, constituting infants’ very first experience with language, may thus play a fundamental role in speech perception and language development.

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Section: Speech Perception Abilities Shaped By Prenatal Experiencementioning

confidence: 89%

Neurodevelopmental Preparedness for Language in the Neonatal Brain

Nallet

Gervain

2021

Annu. Rev. Dev. Psychol.

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“…Arguably, intonation production starts from birth with crying (Mampe et al, 2009) and vocalisation shortly after birth (Kent and Murray, 1982). Newborn infants' crying patterns already reflect the intonation patterns of their native language (Mampe et al, 2009;Wermke et al, 2016Wermke et al, , 2017Manfredi et al, 2019;Prochnow et al, 2019). Infants begin with a predominant falling pitch contour then progress to other f 0 patterns, with accent range increasing with age (Snow, 2001).…”

Section: Intonationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Tone, Intonation and Emotion Shape the Development of Infants’ Fundamental Frequency Perception

et al. 2022

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Fundamental frequency (ƒ0), perceived as pitch, is the first and arguably most salient auditory component humans are exposed to since the beginning of life. It carries multiple linguistic (e.g., word meaning) and paralinguistic (e.g., speakers’ emotion) functions in speech and communication. The mappings between these functions and ƒ0 features vary within a language and differ cross-linguistically. For instance, a rising pitch can be perceived as a question in English but a lexical tone in Mandarin. Such variations mean that infants must learn the specific mappings based on their respective linguistic and social environments. To date, canonical theoretical frameworks and most empirical studies do not view or consider the multi-functionality of ƒ0, but typically focus on individual functions. More importantly, despite the eventual mastery of ƒ0 in communication, it is unclear how infants learn to decompose and recognize these overlapping functions carried by ƒ0. In this paper, we review the symbioses and synergies of the lexical, intonational, and emotional functions that can be carried by ƒ0 and are being acquired throughout infancy. On the basis of our review, we put forward the Learnability Hypothesis that infants decompose and acquire multiple ƒ0 functions through native/environmental experiences. Under this hypothesis, we propose representative cases such as the synergy scenario, where infants use visual cues to disambiguate and decompose the different ƒ0 functions. Further, viable ways to test the scenarios derived from this hypothesis are suggested across auditory and visual modalities. Discovering how infants learn to master the diverse functions carried by ƒ0 can increase our understanding of linguistic systems, auditory processing and communication functions.

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“…For F0 and for each formant, the mean, median, standard deviation, maximum and minimum values are calculated and saved in excel tables. Furthermore, differently from other automatic software tools, BioVoice computes the melodic shape of F0, identifying up to 12 melodic shapes (rising, falling, symmetric, plateau, low-up, up-low, double, frequency step, complex, unstructured, not a cry, other) [11].It is also possible to perform a perceptual melodic analysis, looking at each melodic shape of F0 and classifying them manually. Some other options are available.…”

Section: A Biovoice: Software Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%