ArticleScientific reports2021
Melody complexity of infants' cry and non-cry vocalisations increases across the first six months.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Melodic and articulatory development is delayed in deaf infants aged 2-4 months.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Listening deeper: neural networks unravel acoustic features in preterm infant crying.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Sound of Emotional Prosody: Nearly 3 Decades of Research and Future Directions.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Article
- Article
- Acoustic features of vocalizations in typically developing and autistic infants in the first year.Research in developmental disabilities · 2024Article
- Infant cries convey both stable and dynamic information about age and identity.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- Exploring individual differences in musical rhythm and grammar skills in school-aged children with typically developing language.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Fundamental Frequency Contour (Melody) of Infant Vocalizations across the First Year.Folia phoniatrica et logopaedica : official organ of the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics (IALP) · 2023Article
- Motor constellation theory: A model of infants' phonological development.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In early infancy, melody provides the most salient prosodic element for language acquisition and there is huge evidence for infants' precocious aptitudes for musical and speech melody perception. Yet, a lack of knowledge remains with respect to melody patterns of infants' vocalisations. In a search for developmental regularities of cry and non-cry vocalisations and for building blocks of prosody (intonation) over the first 6 months of life, more than 67,500 melodies (fundamental frequency contours) of 277 healthy infants from monolingual German families were quantitatively analysed. Based on objective criteria, vocalisations with well-identifiable melodies were grouped into those exhibiting a simple (single-arc) or complex (multiple-arc) melody pattern. Longitudinal analysis using fractional polynomial multi-level mixed effects logistic regression models were applied to these patterns. A significant age (but not sex) dependent developmental pattern towards more complexity was demonstrated in both vocalisation types over the observation period. The theoretical concept of melody development (MD-Model) contends that melody complexification is an important building block on the path towards language. Recognition of this developmental process will considerably improve not only our understanding of early preparatory processes for language acquisition, but most importantly also allow for the creation of clinically robust risk markers for developmental language disorders.
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