As a result,distinctions between processing biases and familiarity effects
may be obscured.Speech and Sign for Infants
Do music-processing skills of infants have relevance or consequences
beyond the laboratory? They do,indeed.Caregivers the world over
enhance their vocal messages to prelinguistic infants by making them
more musical than usual.They use simple but distinctive pitch contours
but articulate words poorly;they raise their pitch level,slow their tempo,
and make their utterances more rhythmic and repetitive compared with
their conventional speech patterns (Papousˇek,Papousˇek,and Bornstein
1985;Grieser and Kuhl 1988;Fernald et al.1989;Fernald 1991;Papousˇek,
Papousˇek,and Symmes 1991;Cooper 1993).In general,playful speech to
infants embodies high pitch and expanded pitch contours that are rising
or rise-fall in shape;soothing speech involves low pitch,a reduced pitch
range,and pitch contours that are level or falling (Fernald 1989;
Papousˇek,Papousˇek,and Symmes 1991).
The pervasiveness of musical features in infant-directed utterances
led several investigators to characterize these utterances as melodies
(Fernald 1989;Papousˇek et al.1990;Papousˇek,Papousˇek,and Symmes
1991).Such primitive messages have attentional and affective conse-
quences for the noncomprehending infant audience.For example,infants
show more positive affect to approving than to disapproving utterances
(Papousˇek et al.1990;Fernald 1993) and to infant-directed speech than
to adult-directed speech (Werker and McLeod 1989).Beginning in the
newborn period and continuing thereafter,infant-directed speech effec-
tively recruits and maintains infant attention (Fernald 1985;Cooper and
Aslin 1990;Pegg,Werker and McLeod 1992;Werker,Pegg,and McLeod
1994).According to Fernald (1992),infants’ biological makeup predis-
poses them to attend selectively to distinctive pitch contours of infant-
directed speech,whose primitive emotional meanings can be decoded
in the absence of language.Cross-cultural similarities in some emotion-
bearing aspects of adult speech (Krauss,Curran,and Ferleger 1983;Frick
1985) are consistent with Fernald’s (1992) claim of the transparency of
infant-directed messages.
Natural attention-getting properties of infant-directed speech may
include highly contrastive fundamental frequencies (Fernald 1989;Cooper
1997).Of interest,highly contrastive visual movements in infant-directed
sign language (Erting,Prezioso,and O’Grandy Hynes 1990;Masataka
1992) result in greater attentional and affective responsiveness relative to
adult-directed signing,not only by deaf infants (Masataka 1996) but also
by hearing infants with no previous exposure to sign (Masataka 1998).437 Human Processing Predispositions