Across demographics and recent history, most parents sing to their infants and toddlers daily

Yan, Rong; Jessani, Ghazal; Spelke, Elizabeth S.; Villiers, Peter de; Villiers, Jill de; Mehr, Samuel A.

doi:10.31234/osf.io/fy5bh

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(73 reference statements)

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“…In music, infant-directed songs also seem to have some stereotyped acoustic features. Lullabies, for example, tend toward slower tempos, reduced accentuation, and simple repetitive melodic patterns 31,32,35,75 , supporting functional roles associated with infant care 33,41,46 in industrialized 34,[76][77][78] and small-scale societies 79,80 . Infants are soothed by these acoustic features, whether produced in familiar 44,45 or unfamiliar songs 81 , and both adults and children reliably associate the same features with a soothing function 31,32,75 .…”

Section: Mainmentioning

confidence: 90%

Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures

Hilton

Moser

Bertolo

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Humans often produce vocalizations for infants that differ from vocalizations for adults. Is this property common across societies? The forms of infant-directed vocalizations may be shaped by their function in parent-infant communication. If so, infant-directed song and speech should be differentiable from adult-directed song and speech on the basis of their acoustic features, and this property should be relatively invariant across cultures. To test this hypothesis, we built a corpus of 1,614 recordings of infant-and adult-directed singing and speech produced by 411 people living in 21 urban, rural, and small-scale societies. We studied the corpus in a massive online experiment and in a series of acoustic analyses. Naïve listeners (N = 13,218) reliably identified infant-directed vocalizations as infant-directed, and adult-directed speech (but not songs) as adult-directed, at rates far higher than chance. Ratings of infant-directed song were the most accurate and the most consistent across all societies; infant-directed speech was accurately identified on average, but inconsistently across societies. To determine the mechanisms underlying these results, we extracted many acoustic features from each recording and identified those that most reliably characterize infant-directed song and speech across cultures, via preregistered exploratory-confirmatory analyses and machine classification. The features distinguishing infant-and adult-directed song and speech concerned pitch, rhythmic, phonetic, and timbral attributes; a hypothesis-free classifier with cross-validation across societies reliably identified all vocalization types, with highest accuracy for infant-directed song. Last, we isolated 12 acoustic features that were predictive of perceived infant-directedness; of these, two pitch attributes (median F0 and its variability) were by far the most explanatory. These findings demonstrate cross-cultural regularities in infant-directed vocalizations that are suggestive of universality; moreover, infant-directed song appears to be more cross-culturally stereotyped than infant-directed speech, informing hypotheses of the functions and evolution of both.The forms of many animal signals are shaped by their functions, a link arising from production-and reception-2 related rules that help to maintain reliable signal detection within and across species 1-6 . This is especially 3 true of vocal signals, where form-function links have been demonstrated across many species, including 4 nonhuman primates 3 , meerkats 7 , grackles 8 , frogs 9 , and fish 10 . 5The link between form and function in vocalizations is also evident from listeners' behavior. For example, 6 humans 11 , red deer 12 , and canines 13 reliably detect the intentions of heterospecific signalers on the basis of 7 the sounds of their signals. A classic demonstration of this fact is the ability of some species to eavesdrop 8 on the alarm signals of other species, whether or not their own species has an extended vocal repertoire 14,15 . 9 In humans, an area of...

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Section: Mainmentioning

confidence: 90%

Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures

Hilton

Moser

Bertolo

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

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“…Mosing et al, 2015;Bertolo et al, 2023). Women are slightly better at recognizing familiar melodies (Miles et al, 2016), at mistuning perception (Bertolo et al, 2023), at music achievement (Mosing et al, 2015), appreciating more music (Hagen and Bryant, 2003;Varella et al, 2010), liking to sing more than men (Varella et al, 2010;De Moor et al, 2013;Yan et al, 2021); even the complexity of songs across primates is female-biased (Schruth et al, 2021). Compared to women, men tend to enjoy playing musical instruments more (Varella et al, 2010), tend to be slightly better in rhythmic discrimination task (Mosing et al, 2015;Bertolo et al, 2023), and slightly better in melodic and pitch discrimination tasks (Mosing et al, 2015); cross-culturally, music performers tend to be male (Savage et al, 2015;Mehr et al, 2018Mehr et al, , 2019.…”

Section: Peak Tiredness-why Succumb To Pleasurable and Emotional Stim...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Varella

2023

Front. Psychol.

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Human musicality exhibits the necessary hallmarks for biological adaptations. Evolutionary explanations focus on recurrent adaptive problems that human musicality possibly solved in ancestral environments, such as mate selection and competition, social bonding/cohesion and social grooming, perceptual and motor skill development, conflict reduction, safe time-passing, transgenerational communication, mood regulation and synchronization, and credible signaling of coalition and territorial/predator defense. Although not mutually exclusive, these different hypotheses are still not conceptually integrated nor clearly derived from independent principles. I propose The Nocturnal Evolution of Human Musicality and Performativity Theory in which the night-time is the missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle of human musicality and performing arts. The expansion of nocturnal activities throughout human evolution, which is tied to tree-to-ground sleep transition and habitual use of fire, might help (i) explain the evolution of musicality from independent principles, (ii) explain various seemingly unrelated music features and functions, and (iii) integrate many ancestral adaptive values proposed. The expansion into the nocturnal niche posed recurrent ancestral adaptive challenges/opportunities: lack of luminosity, regrouping to cook before sleep, imminent dangerousness, low temperatures, peak tiredness, and concealment of identity. These crucial night-time features might have selected evening-oriented individuals who were prone to acoustic communication, more alert and imaginative, gregarious, risk-taking and novelty-seeking, prone to anxiety modulation, hedonistic, promiscuous, and disinhibited. Those night-time selected dispositions may have converged and enhanced protomusicality into human musicality by facilitating it to assume many survival- and reproduction-enhancing roles (social cohesion and coordination, signaling of coalitions, territorial defense, antipredatorial defense, knowledge transference, safe passage of time, children lullabies, and sexual selection) that are correspondent to the co-occurring night-time adaptive challenges/opportunities. The nocturnal dynamic may help explain musical features (sound, loudness, repetitiveness, call and response, song, elaboration/virtuosity, and duetting/chorusing). Across vertebrates, acoustic communication mostly occurs in nocturnal species. The eveningness chronotype is common among musicians and composers. Adolescents, who are the most evening-oriented humans, enjoy more music. Contemporary tribal nocturnal activities around the campfire involve eating, singing/dancing, storytelling, and rituals. I discuss the nocturnal integration of musicality’s many roles and conclude that musicality is probably a multifunctional mental adaptation that evolved along with the night-time adaptive landscape.

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“…Evidence from multiple domains suggests that opportunities to integrate episodes across multiple timescales will generally characterize infants' everyday dynamics, but this deserves empirical inquiry for everyday music. Encouragingly, related efforts are underway (Benetti & Costa-Giomi, 2019;Yan et al, 2021). Importantly, many details of musical episodes --like their pitches and rhythms --must be specified in order to understand how they matter for infants' learning, memory, and musical enculturation trajectories.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday Parameters for Episode‐to‐Episode Dynamics in the Daily Music of Infancy

Mendoza

Fausey

2022

Cognitive Science

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Experience-dependent change pervades early human development. Though trajectories of developmental change have been well charted in many domains, the episode-to-episode schedules of experiences on which they are hypothesized to depend have not. Here, we took up this issue in a domain known to be governed in part by early experiences: music. Using a corpus of longform audio recordings, we parameterized the daily schedules of music encountered by 35 infants ages 6-12 months. We discovered that everyday music episodes, as well as the interstices between episodes, typically persisted less than a minute, with most daily schedules also including some very extended episodes and interstices. We also discovered that infants encountered music episodes in a bursty rhythm, rather than a periodic or random rhythm, over the day. These findings join a suite of recent discoveries from everyday vision, motor, and language that expand our imaginations beyond artificial learning schedules and enable theorists to model the history-dependence of developmental process in ways that respect everyday sensory histories. Future theories about how infants build knowledge across multiple episodes can now be parameterized using these insights from infants' everyday lives.

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Across demographics and recent history, most parents sing to their infants and toddlers daily

Cited by 5 publications

References 38 publications

Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures

Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures

Nocturnal selective pressures on the evolution of human musicality as a missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle

Everyday Parameters for Episode‐to‐Episode Dynamics in the Daily Music of Infancy

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