INFANT\u27S EXPRESSION AND PERCEPTION OF EMOTION THROUGH VOCALIZATIONS

This paper examined two hypotheses; (1) infants produce voices necessary for emotional communication; and (2) Infants interpret emotions contained in their own vocalizations. Voice samples produced by six infants at 6, 9, 12 and 17 months of age were perceptually evaluated by 79 adults (aged 20-22) and 31 children (aged 2-6) using rating scales representing emotions. The following results were obtained. 1) Even six month old infants who have not yet developed a language could produce various voices necessary for emotional communication through nonlinguistic aspects of voice. 2) Both the adult and child listeners perceived rich contents of emotions from the voice samples recorded even at 6 month of age. 3) More factors were needed to account for the rating scores given by the children than by the adults via factor analyses. 4) Children seem to be more sensitive in perception of emotions from infants\u27 vocalization than the adults. These results support the hypothesis that "infants begin to communicate through nonlinguistic aspects of voice at very early stage of their life."出版社版平成5・6年度科学研究費補助金(一般研究(C))研究成果報告書「乳児の音声コミュニケーション行動の発達に関する研究」(研究課題番号05808033) を構成する文献として掲