Emotion and music in infancy

The infant's environment is filled with musical input. Mothers' speech to infants is music-like, exhibiting a variety of musical features that reflect its emotional expressiveness. Although this speech has similar melodic contours across cultures, which reflect comparable expressive intentions, each mother has individually distinctive interval patterns or speech tunes. Mothers also sing to infants in an emotive manner, their repeated performances being unusually stable in pitch and tempo. Infants prefer affectively positive speech to affectively neutral speech, and they prefer infant-directed performances of songs to other performances. When infants are presented with audio-visual versions of their mother's speech and singing, they exhibit more sustained interest in the singing than in the speech episodes. Finally, live maternal singing has more sustained effects on infant arousal than does live maternal speech. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest directions for future research.