ArticleNature human behaviour2022
Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 61 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
61 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Language experience predicts music processing in a half-million speakers of fifty-four languages.Current biology : CB · 2023Pooled it
- Music and speech input in the home environments of Latinx infants.Infant behavior & development · 2026Article
- A solution to generalized learning from small training sets found in infants' repeated visual experiences of individual objects.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Development of auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over the first postnatal year.eLife · 2026Article
- Moving, Seeing, Hearing, Smelling and Tasting: How Sensory-Motor Experiences Shape Early Cognitive Development.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Patterns and Predictors of Children's Musical Engagement From an Aotearoa NZ Longitudinal Cohort.Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand · 2026Article
- InCHORRRuS: Infant-Directed Communication Highlights and Organizes Repetition and Redundancy Through Rhythmic Structure.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning: A Machine Learning Approach.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Speakers Use More Redundant Color Adjectives When Speaking to Children Than Adults.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Social Context Matters for Turn-Taking Dynamics: A Comparative Study of Autistic and Typically Developing Children.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Musical aptitude moderates ease and vividness but not frequency of the speech-to-song illusion.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Chants across seven traditions share acoustic traits that enhance subjective relaxation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The role of musical pitch in long-distance defensive signaling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Brief Report: Telehealth Music-Enhanced Reciprocal Imitation Training in Autism: A Single-Subject Feasibility Study of a Virtual Parent Coaching Intervention.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2025Article
- The neurobiology of altered states of consciousness induced by drumming and other rhythmic sound patterns.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Music is scaled, while speech is not: A cross-cultural analysis.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Investigation of mothers' elicited infant-directed speech and singing for preterm infants.Pediatric research · 2025Article
- CoVox: A dataset of contrasting vocalizations.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Temporal patterns in the complexity of child-directed song lyrics reflect their functions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Acoustic Exaggeration Enhances Speech Discrimination in Young Autistic Children.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2025Article
1 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
43 authors.
Funding
Abstract
When interacting with infants, humans often alter their speech and song in ways thought to support communication. Theories of human child-rearing, informed by data on vocal signalling across species, predict that such alterations should appear globally. Here, we show acoustic differences between infant-directed and adult-directed vocalizations across cultures. We collected 1,615 recordings of infant- and adult-directed speech and song produced by 410 people in 21 urban, rural and small-scale societies. Infant-directedness was reliably classified from acoustic features only, with acoustic profiles of infant-directedness differing across language and music but in consistent fashions. We then studied listener sensitivity to these acoustic features. We played the recordings to 51,065 people from 187 countries, recruited via an English-language website, who guessed whether each vocalization was infant-directed. Their intuitions were more accurate than chance, predictable in part by common sets of acoustic features and robust to the effects of linguistic relatedness between vocalizer and listener. These findings inform hypotheses of the psychological functions and evolution of human communication.
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