Premium
Whining as mother‐directed speech
Author(s) -
Sokol Rosemarie I.,
Webster Karen L.,
Thompson Nicholas S.,
Stevens David A.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
infant and child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.87
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1522-7219
pISSN - 1522-7227
DOI - 10.1002/icd.420
Subject(s) - psychology , prosody , statement (logic) , perception , multidimensional scaling , salient , similarity (geometry) , accommodation , linguistics , cognitive psychology , philosophy , statistics , mathematics , neuroscience , artificial intelligence , computer science , image (mathematics)
Although little studied, whining is a vocal pattern that is both familiar and irritating to parents of preschool‐ and early school‐age children. The current study employed multidimensional scaling to identify the crucial acoustic characteristics of whining speech by analysing participants' perceptions of its similarity to other types of speech (question, neutral speech, angry statement, demand, and boasting). We discovered not only that participants find whining speech more annoying than other forms of speech, but that it shares the salient acoustic characteristics found in motherese, namely increased pitch, slowed production, and exaggerated pitch contours. We think that this relationship is not random but may reflect the fact that the two forms of vocalization are the result of a similar accommodation to a universal human auditory sensitivity to the prosody of both forms of speech. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.