title: Listener and context dependency in the perception of emotional aspects of infant voice.
abstract: Developmental aspects of an infant's ability to express emotions through vocalizations were studied based on perceptual rating experiments against 12 vocalization- and emotion-related reference words. Three groups of listeners, students, mothers with infants, and nursery governesses, rated 28 voice samples recorded from a male infant at 6, 9, 12 and 17 months of age, under a positive or negative context. Among three factors extracted by a factor analysis, one representing the emotional contrast of frightened/angry versus happy was found to be independent of listener group, infant age and context. The other two, one representing contrast between pleased/happy versus demanding/sad and the other seeking affection and rejecting/angry were dependent on infant age and context. These results may indicate that infants even at 6 months of age can express the emotional contrast of 'pleasure' versus 'discomfort' through vocalization, which listeners perceive independently in context.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Education, Saitama University, Japan.
authors.forename: Y
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shimura
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Imaizumi
mesh_terms: D000786:Anger; D001307:Auditory Perception; D004644:Emotions; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007845:Laughter; D008297:Male; D014831:Voice / Q000502:physiology*