Acoustic discrimination of three types of infant cries.
The ability of acoustic characteristics, both separately and in linear combination with others, to differentiate among procedural pain-induced, hungry, and fussy crying was explored using audiorecordings of cries from healthy 2 to 4-month-old infants. Fussy cries were less tense than hungry or pain-induced cries and pain-induced cries had significantly stronger second formant amplitudes than fussy or hungry cries. Formants and tenseness were important contributors to a linear combination of acoustic measures, derived from discriminant function analysis, which correctly classified 74% of the procedural pain-induced crying specimens. The inability of this linear combination of acoustic measures to identify correctly approximately one-third of the cry specimens suggests that the discrete acoustic differences among the three situationally defined types of crying is not large.
Fuller
B F
BF
University of Colorado, School of Nursing, Denver.
D000162:Acoustics; D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003448:Crying; D016002:Discriminant Analysis; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D006815:Hunger; D007223:Infant; D008297:Male; D010146:Pain; D012737:Sex Factors