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Crying of a newborn child: alarm signal or protocommunication?

A Clarici1, L Travan, A Accardo

  • 1Department of Physiology and Pathology, University of Trieste, Italy. clarici@univ.trieste.it

Perceptual and Motor Skills
|January 2, 2003
PubMed

The purpose of the study was to explore whether the new-born cry is a simple alarm signal or differentiated cries with different meanings. 12 digital audio taped recordings of 6 full-term healthy babies were analysed. Cries of 6 newborns in this preliminary study were recorded in a pain condition after a prick for the hematic check-up the third day after delivery and then while crying spontaneously in the cradle. The sounds were sampled at 44100 Hz with a 16-bit resolution and converted to the .wav format. All the analyses were performed with a software written in the MAT-LAB environment. The most important result was that these new-born children modulated the supralaryngeal tract considerably more in cries following the painful stimulus than in "spontaneous" ones, as would be expected by the hypothesis of crying as "protolanguage."

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