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Speech vs. singing: infants choose happier sounds
Marieve Corbeil1, Sandra E Trehub, Isabelle Peretz
1International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research, Department of Psychology, Université de Montréal Montréal, QC, Canada.
Frontiers in Psychology
|June 28, 2013
Summary
Infants pay more attention to happy speech than to singing. Voice quality, specifically happiness, is more important than whether the sound is speech or singing for infant attention.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Infant Auditory Perception
- Speech and Language Development
Background:
- Infants show preferences for speech over non-vocal sounds and happy speech over neutral speech.
- While infants are interested in singing, their relative preference for speech versus singing is not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate infants' attention to unfamiliar audio samples of speech and singing.
- To determine whether vocal mode (speech vs. singing) or voice quality (happy vs. neutral) influences infant auditory attention.
Main Methods:
- Experiment 1: Infants (4-13 months) listened to happy infant-directed speech versus hummed lullabies.
- Experiment 2: Infants heard sung versus spoken lyrics of a Turkish children's song in a happy manner.
- Experiment 3: Infants heard happily sung lyrics versus spoken lyrics (adult-directed/neutral) of the same song.
Main Results:
- Infants listened longer to happy speech than to lullabies in Experiment 1, noting speech's greater acoustic variability.
- No significant difference in listening time between sung and spoken happy lyrics in Experiment 2.
- Infants listened significantly longer to happily sung lyrics than to neutrally spoken lyrics in Experiment 3.
Conclusions:
- Happy voice quality is a primary factor driving infant attention, overriding the vocal mode (speech or singing).
- Infant auditory preferences are modulated by vocal affect and acoustic properties rather than simply speech versus singing.
- These findings contribute to understanding early auditory processing and the development of communication preferences in infants.
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