Crying of newborn babies: A sign of inborn musical skill?

Even the crying of newborn babies seems to be more musical than we think. This can be concluded from an interesting study that was published last month in Current Biology. German researchers were able to show that newborns don’t just cry randomly, but - when studying the audio signal of their crying - one can distinguish between French and German babies. The German babies - only three days old - cry in a downward fashion, their French contemporaries showed an increasing swelling of the cry and stop abruptly.

Sound example: German & French baby cries.

How can we explain these differences? Babies do hear about three months before they are born. And the few prenatal studies that are available show that babies, in that stage of their development, already perceive and remember sounds. For instance, they recognize the sound of their mothers voice just after birth, and they can distinguish between tunes that they heard during pregnancy from those that they have never been exposed to before.

The correlation between the mother language of the babies and their average crying pattern, suggests that exposure to the language spoken by their caregivers (mother, father, etc.) influences the crying, since French language, on average, consists of raising melodies, and German intonation often shows a decreasing shape. The researchers suggest that this as a sign of a sensitivity to language from very early on in life.

My interpretation would be different. I would not so much relate these results to language, as well as a sign of a high sensitivity to the musical aspects of speech: rhythm, melody, stress (i.e. prosody). As quite some studies have shown (e.g., authors like Fernald, Trehub, Trainor, and others), infants and young children are extremely sensitive to these 'musical' variations in their environment. For example, infants seem to be highly sensitive for the musical and emotional aspects of infant-directed speech (IDS), more so than the actual linguistic structure, let alone semantics. I would therefore claim the results of the baby-study are actual evidence for very early signs of musical sensitivity to intonation and other musical aspects of sound, than that it should be seen as evidence for the start of learning a language.

P.S. I describe this argument in length in my new book Iedereen is muzikaal (Only available in Dutch).

Mampe, B., Friederici, A., Christophe, A., & Wermke, K. (2009). Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.09.064

De do do do, de da da da?*

For a long time I thought of it as quite a peculiar phenomenon: grown-ups who, the moment they spot a baby, start talking in a curious dialect. A dialect that has unclear semantics, little or no grammar, and is full of exaggerated rhythmic and melodic diversions.

Nevertheless, babies seem to love it. They react —cooing with pleasure—to melodies that are not unlike pop songs as ‘De do do do, de da da da’ of The Police or ‘La la la’ by Kylie Minoque.

This babbling or, more formally, infant-direct speech (IDS) differs from normal adult speech by its high pitch, exaggerated melodic contours, slower tempo, and more rhythmic variation. A kind of ‘musilanguage’ indeed. It is a widespread phenomenon that is —as far as we know— present in all cultures and has more similarities than differences -- even when some characteristics of IDS conflict with the rules of the adult language (e.g. Chinese). So it seems quite unlikely that IDS is ‘just’ a preparation for language, until recently the most common interpretation.

Laurel Trainor, and her team at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada), suggests that IDS is essentially a tool to communicate emotion. The decoding of the speech patterns into their emotional meaning is something infants can do easily, and long before they learn about language. In that sense, it seems likely that language makes use of faculties special to music instead of it being a side effect of language (as as suggested once by a well-known cognitive psychologist).

Henkjan Honing (2008). De vergeten luisteraar [The Forgotten Listener] Boekman (77), 42-47

* Repeated from June 6th, 2008.

De do do do, de da da da?

For a long time I thought of it as quite a peculiar phenomenon: grown-ups who, the moment they spot a baby, start talking in a curious dialect. A dialect that has unclear semantics, little or no grammar, and is full of exaggerated rhythmic and melodic diversions. Nevertheless, babies love it. They react, cooing with pleasure, to melodies that are not unlike pop songs as ‘De do do do, de da da da’ of The Police or ‘La la la’ by Kylie Minoque. This babbling, or, more formally, infant-direct speech (IDS), differs from normal adult speech by its high pitch, exaggerated melodic contours, a slower tempo, and more rhythmic variation. A kind of ‘musilanguage’ indeed.

IDS is a widespread phenomenon that is —as far as we know— present in all cultures and has more similarities than differences, even when some characteristics of IDS conflict with the rules of the adult language, like Chinese. Hence, it is unlikely that IDS is ‘just’ a preparation for language -- until recently the most common interpretation.

Laurel Trainor, and her team at McMaster University (Ontario, Canada) suggests that IDS is essentially a tool to communicate emotion. The decoding of the speech patterns into their emotional meaning is something infants can do easily, and long before they learn about language. In that sense, it seems more likely that language makes use of faculties special to music then that it emerged as a side effect of language (as as suggested once by a well-known cognitive psychologist).

Laurel J. Trainor, Caren M. Austin, Renee N. Desjardins (2000). Is Infant-Directed Speech Prosody a Result of the Vocal Expression of Emotion? Psychological Science, 11 (3), 188-195 DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.00240

Why do we have music? (On music vs musicality)

Looking back on it, a returning question in this blog turns out to be: Why do we have music? And what is the point of studying it scientificly?

While it became quite popular to address such questions from an evolutionary perspective, there is still little support for the idea that music is an adaptation, that it makes you live longer, or that it makes one sexually more attractive. In fact, it made Steven Pinker position music as, at most, a byproduct of language:

As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless … music is quite different from language … it is a technology, not an adaptation (Pinker, 1997)

This statement —and the reference to music as ‘auditory cheesecake'— did not, as you can imagine, increase his popularity among music lovers. Nevertheless, he succeeded well in starting up a discussion under music scholars and cognitive scientists on why we have music and why it could be relevant for cognitive science to study music (e.g., Ashley et al, 2006; Zatorre, 2005).

In that respect, the archaeologist Steven Mithen did something you might have expected from a music scholar or cognitive scientist. In his book The Singing Neantherthals he presents a compelling story in support of the shared evolutionary origins of music and language. As the book title suggests, Mithen is particularly concerned with the Neanderthals, presenting them as intelligent and highly emotional individuals who communicated with a particularly musical version of Hmmmmm. (‘Hmmmm’ being Mithen's proposal for a musilanguage that might have preceded language and music).

In turn, Mithen’s book generated quite some discussion as well. In part because of the (impossible) question on what defines music, or, to be more precise, the important distinction between musicality and music. In a recent paper Mithen makes himself more clear:

The distinction I should have made explicit was between a ‘natural biologically based musicality’ and music as a culturally constructed phenomenon which builds upon that biological basis. So the musical ‘m’ in Hmmmmm ought to stand for the former — which had seemed quite obvious to me already — while the latter developed after Hmmmmm had bifurcated into music and language. Although I appreciate that the following have a culturally learnt component, I would describe bird song, whale song, primate vocalizations and baby babble as possessing musicality rather than being music.

Mithen, S., Morley, I., Wray, A., Tallerman, M., Gamble, C. (2006). The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body , by Steven Mithen. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005. ISBN 0-297-64317-7 hardback £20 & US$25.2; ix+374 pp.. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 16(01), 97. DOI: 10.1017/S0959774306000060

McDERMOTT, J., HAUSER, M. (2005). THE ORIGINS OF MUSIC: INNATENESS, UNIQUENESS, AND EVOLUTION. Music Perception, 23(1), 29-59. DOI: 10.1525/mp.2005.23.1.29

Does music facilitate language acquisition?

The latest issue of Cognition contains a brief, yet interesting study on the role of music in language acquisition. While several authors have shown that language learning can be modeled according to the statistical properties of syllable sentences, just a few studies showed that for musical information a similar case for statistical learning can be made.

Daniele Schön (Marseille, France) and collaborators show in their study that a group of French participants, with an average age of 23, do better in learning new words associated with distinct pitches –a melody- than those being spoken in monotonous fashion (In this case really monotonous since it was a speech synthesizer). The study is especially interesting in the context of research on infant-directed speech that turns out to be quite ‘musical’ (i.e. melody and rhythm play an important role), especially when compared to ‘real’ speech, as such indirectly supporting the idea that these musical aspects actually facilitate communication and learning in infants.

However, since only language learning was tested, it could not be shown that the participants relied more on musical than on linguistic information. An effect one could expect since several studies have shown that musical information can help in memorization and learning. While the authors were able to show that

“learning a new language, especially in the first learning phase wherein one needs to segment new words, may largely benefit of the motivational and structuring properties of music in song”

unfortunately —because of the experimental design used— no conclusion can be drawn about whether learners rely more on musical or linguistic information. What could be shown was that linguistic information took precedence over musical statistical cues. I would have expected the opposite, like it was found in infant studies.

SCHON, D., BOYER, M., MORENO, S., BESSON, M., PERETZ, I., KOLINSKY, R. (2008). Songs as an aid for language acquisition. Cognition, 106(2), 975-983. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.03.005