First Sounds of Emotion: Newborns' Sensitivity to Emotional Prosody and Its Relation With Maternal Depressive Traits

The ability to perceive and respond to vocal emotional cues is critical for early social development, guiding infants' interactions with caregivers. Although newborns are believed to preferentially attend to positive prosody, the perceptual mechanisms underlying this response-as well as the degree to which these responses are language-specific-remain poorly understood. This study examined newborns' sensitivity to emotional prosody above and beyond linguistic prosody marking different sentence types (i.e., interrogatives, imperatives, and declaratives) and its relation to maternal postnatal depressive traits. Forty-three newborns were presented with interrogative, imperative, and declarative utterances spoken each with happy, neutral, and sad prosodies while their non-nutritive sucking (NNS) behavior was measured and maternal depressive traits were assessed. Results revealed inhibited NNS behavior in response to sad and neutral utterances compared to happy ones (ps < 0.05), suggesting early differential responsiveness to positive vocal affect, independent of the linguistic prosodic contours of the sentence type. Moreover, reduced responsiveness to non-positive prosodies was positively associated with maternal postnatal depressive traits, suggesting that variation in the early affective environment may shape newborns' auditory-emotional sensitivity. These findings highlight the interplay between biological predispositions and environmental influences in early emotional processing, emphasizing the role of early auditory experiences in shaping socio-emotional development.