Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology www.jsecjournal.com - 2011, 5(2), 131-141.

Original Article

WHINES, CRIES, AND MOTHERESE: THEIR RELATIVE POWER TO DISTRACT

Rosemarie Sokol Chang* Department of Psychology, SUNY New Paltz Nicholas S. Thompson Department of Psychology, Clark University Abstract There is ample support for the ability of motherese and infant cries, and more recently whining, to attract the attention of listeners. Similarly, Morsbach, McCulloch & Clark (1986) showed that infant cries were better at distracting listeners who were instructed to pay attention to a simple cognitive task. As an extension of this early study, the current study examined the ability of whines, cries, and motherese to distract listeners. All participants completed a series of simple subtraction problems while listening to these three attachment vocalizations as well as to machine noise, neutral speech, and silence (non-attachment controls). Distraction was measured in terms of number of subtraction problems completed, errors made, and a proportion score of errors to problems completed, for each condition. Participants, regardless of gender or parental status, were more distracted when listening to attachment vocalizations than silence as measured by number of problems completed, and were more distracted by whines than machine noise or motherese as measured by proportion scores. In absolute numbers, participants were most distracted by whines, followed by infant cries and motherese. We consider this study further evidence that whines, cries, and motherese are all part of an attachment vocalization system that exploit an auditory sensitivity shared by humans. Keywords: Whining, attachment vocalizations, prosody, motherese, infant cries, auditory sensitivity

Introduction Whines, cries, and motherese have important features in common: they are all well-suited for getting the attention of listeners (see Chang & Thompson, 2010, for a review), and they share salient acoustic characteristics those of increased pitch, varied pitch contours, and slowed production, though the production speed of cries varies (e.g. Sokol, Webster, Thompson, & Stevens, 2005). Motherese is the child-directed speech parents use towards infants and young children to sooth, attract attention, encourage particular behaviors, and prohibit the child from dangerous acts (Fernald, 1992). Infant
AUTHOR NOTE: Please direct correspondence to Rosemarie Sokol Chang, Department of Psychology, SUNY New Paltz, 1 Hawk Dr., New Paltz, NY 12561. Email: rischang@gmail.com
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cries are the sole means of communication for infants for the first few months, and a primary means in the later months. Cries signal that the infant needs care, be it feeding, changing, protection, or physical contact. Whines enter into a childs vocal repertoire with the onset of language, typically peaking between 2.5 and 4 years of age (Borba, 2003; Sears & Sears, 1995). This sound is perceived as more annoying even than infant cries (Sokol et al., 2005). These three attachment vocalizations whines, cries, and motherese each have a particular effect on the listener; to bring the attachment partner nearer. As such, we consider each to be part of a single system of attachment related vocalizations. Such speculation begins with an examination of attachment relationships, grounded in Bowlbys (1969/1982) theory, in which he postulates that attachment regulates the proximity between caregivers and care receivers. Attachment has been measured by observations of many types of behavior, of particular interest here are attachment vocalizations, or vocalizations designed specifically for interaction with and regulation of an attachment partner. One such vocalization that has received particular attention since the writing of Bowlbys book is the special type of speech employed by caregivers towards children, termed motherese1. Acoustically, motherese is noted for its slowed production, exaggerated pitch contours and heightened pitch in relation to other forms of speech (Fernald, 1992). Motherese is reported to hold multiple functions, including regulation of the infants affect (Trainor, Austin & Desjardins, 2000), to facilitate language acquisition (Karzon, 1985), and to get and maintain the attention of the infant (Fernald, 1992). We are interested in this latter function. Viewing motherese as acoustically important to manipulate the behavior of the infant, Fernald (1992) argues that motherese is a speciesspecific vocalization and proposes that it has such unique acoustic properties because they are best suited to the immature auditory systems of infants. Because the exaggerated sounds are easier for infants to perceive, they elicit more frequent and stronger infant responses. Support for the universality of motherese comes from studies that find comparable acoustic properties in speech samples from different languages (e.g. Fernald, 1992) and studies documenting the use of altered speech to infants in virtually every examined culture (see Falk, 2009). Further, infants respond differentially to speech types from an early age. At as early as one-month old, infants more readily respond to the varied pitch contours of motherese than the more neutrally toned adult-directed speech (Cooper & Aslin, 1994). Fernalds theory explains only why infant-directed vocalizations should have these acoustic properties. However, in various parts, infant cries and whining share these characteristics. Infant cries are most effective when they display heightened pitch and exaggerated pitch contours (Dessureau, Kurowski, & Thompson, 1998; Gustafson & Green, 1989; Robb, Saxman, & Grant, 1989). Crowe and Zeskind (1992) explored cries displaying particularly increased pitch, termed hyperphonated. The normal average fundamental frequency (what we hear as pitch) of an infant cry is between 450-600 hertz (hz), while hyperphonated cries average between 1000-2000 Hz. Hyperphonated cries

There has been criticism of our use of the term motherese in the past (Saxton, 2008). We use the term to designate the prosodic features of the vocalization and not the functions related to language acquisition. Further, maternal vocalizations are produced by mothers in other species, indicating a shared functionality that precedes language use.
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appear to elicit high arousal in adults, shown by skin conductance levels and changes in heart rate. Pitch is clearly an important characteristic of infant cries. Moreover, whining has been shown to share with motherese the qualities of heightened pitch, exaggerated contours, and slowed production when compared to other vocalizations (Sokol et al., 2005). Whining couples such acoustic features with speech, is typically rated as annoying, and is easily distinguished from other vocalizations. Whines, similar to cries, elicit arousal in adults as shown by increases in skin conductance, though no studies have confirmed changes in other physiological measures (Chang & Thompson, 2010). Not only do whines, cries, and motherese share similar acoustic qualities, but variants of motherese and whining are often employed in attachment relationships between adults. These findings suggest that motherese, once considered unique in its prosody, may be one of a suite of vocalizations that employ these sound patterns in attachment relationships (see also Trainor et al., 2000). Contrary to Fernalds (1992) theory, this reasoning would suggest that all humans, rather than infants alone, have an auditory sensitivity to vocalizations that exhibit an increased pitch, slowed production, and exaggerated pitch contours, and also, that this sensitivity is universally exploited in attachment relationships. Thus, we propose that these vocalizations not only have similar structure, but similar functions as well. If all are more distracting to listeners than other sounds, this may be the result of their shared similar acoustic qualities, qualities that according to Fernald (1992) may indicate an auditory sensitivity for such vocalizations. The goal of this study is to explore whether these three attachment vocalizations, whining, infant cries, and motherese have a comparable capacity to distract listeners, or whether, conversely, motherese stands alone in this respect. The method used compares the power of these three vocalizations to distract adults from non-attachment related tasks. This method was pioneered by Morsbach, McCulloch, and Clark (1986) in a demonstration of the relative power of infant crying to distract listeners from a routine task compared to an irritating sound, that of machine noise. The choice of machine noise was perhaps open to question: machines squeal, screech, growl and, in general, make noises that humans name for human emotional vocalizations. Consequently, additional control sounds were employed in our study: silence and neutral speech, typically employed by adults toward other adults and referred to as adult-directed speech. Further, we extended the exploration from that of parents to that of non-parents as well. This was done in order to examine whether attachment vocalizations are distracting as a result of experience as a parent, or due to a shared sensitivity in parents and non-parents alike. The method of distractibility employed here was chosen to address the issue of whether or not attachment related vocalizations affect working memory specifically, rather than long-term memory. Working memory is the immediate memory for information being processed, and these memories can be lost in about 30 seconds unless repeated (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968). Working memory can also be affected in a multimodal fashion; for example, the attention required to process when reading can be affected by attention required to interpret sounds in the environment, such as when one is disrupted from studying by loud whispers in a library. With this method, we explore a similar phenomenon whether participants will be distracted differentially from a mathematics task by sounds and vocalizations, such as would occur when a mother who is reading is suddenly distracted by her baby crying in the next room. We address here the issue of whether or not attachment related vocalizations can distract an individual from short-term activities that do not require long-term memory formation.

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Whining is in part an extension of the acoustic features of cries with the addition of speech. We believe both may serve a more deceptive feature than motherese, serving to signal more extreme distress than the infant or young child is experiencing (Thompson, Dessureau, & Olson, 1998). This idea extends from Thompson et al.s (1998) Respiratory Drama Hypothesis, that infants are designed to manipulate the pitch and rate of production of cries to sound the most distressed in order to extract the most resources from caregivers. This is one way in which cries and whines likely differ from motherese, a vocalization that serves as a more honest signal towards regulating the affect of infants. This study is designed to test three specific hypotheses: 1. Participants will be more distracted by attachment vocalizations (i.e. whines, cries, and motherese) than control conditions, as measured by number of mathematic problems completed, number of incorrect answers (i.e. errors), and a proportion score of errors to problems completed. 2. Since we consider these vocalizations to play to a shared auditory sensitivity, we predict that parents and non-parents, and men and women, will be equally distracted by the attachment vocalizations. 3. Since they are likely more manipulative vocalizations, we predict that cries and whines will be more effective at distracting listeners than motherese. Methods Stimuli For the purposes of this study, recordings were acquired of adult demonstrators speaking in whining, motherese, and neutral speech, as well as an infant cry and machine noise. Adult vocalizations were used because of our laboratorys previous experience eliciting whines from children. For a 5-second sample, children are adequate actors; but for a 1-minute sample as required of this experiment, children cannot act out a sustained whining bout. However, previous research (Lescak, 2007) has established the acoustic similarity of adult and child whines, making us comfortable with the substitution of adult actors. The infant cry was acquired from a file in the Infant Cry Laboratory at Clark University. The machine noise was a table saw that periodically caught on a piece of wood, making a screeching sound. Adult vocalizations were obtained in languages unfamiliar to our participants, so that they would attend to the prosody of the samples not the content: whines in Hindi from an adult female and motherese from an adult female Portuguese speaker. Demonstrators providing the whining and motherese samples were also recorded while providing neutral speech samples for comparison. The speech recordings took place in a noise-controlled room at a constant volume, with an Audio-Technica AT825 series microphone held twelve inches from the demonstrators mouth. To appraise the appropriateness of our stimuli for use in the study we used two methods. The first was to have two independent raters listen to three samples each from the whine and motherese stimuli, and identify which type of speech was being used. This resulted in perfect agreement. The second was to perform an acoustic analysis of the four demonstrator samples by taking three 3-second segments from each. For this method, using Praat 4.2.14 (Boersma & Weenink, 2004), each segment was analyzed to evaluate its pitch, rate of production (e.g. length of spoken portions and inhalations), and variation in pitch, all of which are salient characteristics of whining and motherese (see Sokol et
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al., 2005 for full details). This approach revealed that the whining and motherese stimuli exhibited these characteristics in comparison to the neutral speech sufficient for use in this experiment (see Table 1).
Table 1. Comparison Between Motherese, Whine, and Neutral Speech Samples Acoustic Means for Means for PMeans for Means for PVariable Comparison Motherese value Comparison Whine value Inhalation 1.80 0.19 0.027 (seconds) Phonation 1.23 1.71 0.027 1.58 2.21 0.037 (seconds) Dysphonated 0.46 0.171 0.037 (seconds) Intensity (dB) 63.681 68.542 0.003 Minimum Fo 147.55 251.51 0.065 189.09 280.84 0.023 (Hz) Maximum Fo 174.81 371.68 0.002 257.67 427.65 0.005 (Hz) Range Fo 27.26 120.17 0.031 69.81 146.81 0.087 (Hz) Formant 1 541.20 664.10 0.003 (Hz) Jitter 0.03 0.01 0.02 Rising Pitch 1.66 3.33 0.089 (instances) Flat Pitch 2.66 0.66 0.055 1.66 0.33 0.047 (instances) Note: Values are only reported for comparisons that yielded differences at alpha = 0.10 level. Due to the short length of segments taken from each vocal sample (i.e. 9 seconds total), this less stringent level seems appropriate to establish the worthiness of speech samples.

Participants Participants were 33 undergraduate non-parent volunteers from Clark University (20 females, 13 males) of traditional college age and 26 parent volunteers (15 female and 11 male) from the central Massachusetts, central New Hampshire and upstate New York regions. Participants were recruited following Institutional Review Board approval. Participants were excluded if they understood Hindi or Portuguese to insure that we were measuring distraction due to the prosody rather than the words in the stimuli. The children of parent participants were between four months and four years of age, thus parents were well-accustomed to hearing the attachment vocalizations. The age of children of participants was determined based on general familiarity with attachment related vocalizations. Parents of four month olds are well accustomed to frequent crying, and thus have gained instant experience with such a vocalization. Whining tends to peak between 2.5-4 years of age (Borba, 2003; Sears & Sears, 1995), thus parents of four year olds are likely still experiencing the peak of this vocalization. If distractibility is based only on experience, or lack thereof, we would expect differences between those intimately familiar with attachment vocalizations (parents) and those less familiar (non-parents).

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Procedure Participants were instructed that they would be completing simple subtraction problems for one minute in each of six sound conditions, and that they should complete as many as possible within the time allotted. Participants were presented with a math sheet with 80 comparable problems for each condition. No participant completed all of the math problems before the minute was up. Participants were instructed to pay attention to the math problems and try to ignore the sounds. After each condition, the researcher collected the math sheet and provided another, which was covered until the one minute session began in order to avoid the temptation for participants to look ahead. The six sound conditions were while listening to: motherese, neutral speech, whining, an infant cry, machine noise, or silence (no sound), and participants heard each through headphones. Participants were unaware of what specific sounds they would be hearing. These conditions were presented in random order, as were the sheets of math problems to prevent against practice effects. In the beginning of each condition, participants listened to ten seconds of the recordings without completing problems to familiarize participants with the sounds before beginning the task. This was to allow participants to get used to the new stimulus and get over the initial interest of interpreting a new sound. Participants also had a thirty second pause between conditions. This was to allow the researcher to set up for the next condition, and for the participant to return to a base level of attention between stimuli. Had this study incorporated physiological recording, thirty seconds may not have sufficed to return to a baseline. However, there is no indication that cognitive attention requires the same amount of time to return to equilibrium, and since conditions were counterbalanced, we feel confident that results were not biased based on the length of pause between conditions. Non-parent participants received one M&M candy as reward for every problem solved, and parent participants were entered into a raffle for one of three gift certificates to a toy store. These rewards differed based on the presumed interest of participants. M&Ms provided an immediate incentive for non-parent participants. Similarly, parents participated in the project shortly before the winter holiday season, thus a gift certificate seemed an immediate incentive. Still, the parents incentive was less immediate and therefore non-parent participants may have been more motivated to solve problems than parents. This is not a major concern for two reasons. The first is that comparisons were made between conditions for each participant, and it is unlikely that the incentive offered would have made participants more or less motivated from one condition to the next. Second, we have since done a similar experiment in which all participants received the same incentive, and still found no differences based on the parental status of the participant (Chang & Thompson, 2010). Results Each math sheet was coded for the number of problems completed and errors made per condition. We calculated the third measure of distraction by dividing the number of errors made by the number of problems completed for each participant, called a proportion score. Thus three separate repeated measures ANOVAs compared the effects of the between-subjects variables gender (2) and parental status (2) with the withinsubjects variable (6), each of the six sound (or silence) conditions.

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There were no differences based on gender or parental status for number of problems completed, nor an interaction between the three variables gender, parental status, and condition. There was a significant effect of condition (F(5,275) = 3.13; p = .009; see figure 1). We ran a series of paired samples t-tests to test our predictions about differences between conditions, and adopted a more stringent significance level (p < .01) to correct for Type I errors. These tests revealed that participants completed fewer problems when listening to the whine than silence (t(58) = -2.57, p =.01), but not machine noise (p = .02), neutral speech, or motherese. Participants completed fewer problems when listening to the infant cry than silence (t(58) = -2.93, p = .01), but not machine noise (p = .03), neutral speech, or motherese. Participants also completed fewer problems when listening to the motherese than silence (t(58) = -2.57, p = .01), but not machine noise (p = .03) or neutral speech. There was no difference between either neutral speech or machine noise and the silence condition.

Figure 1. Mean number of problems completed per condition. Error bars represent the standard error.

When analyzing for number of errors made per condition, there was a significant effect of gender only (F(1, 55) = 4.41; p = .04). On average, males made 0.96 errors and females made 0.60 errors. The effect across conditions was not significant (p = .11). Therefore no further analysis was completed. For the proportion of errors made to problems completed, there was an effect based on condition (F(5,275) = 3.0, p = .012, see figure 2). Paired samples t-tests revealed that participants made more errors per problems completed during the whine than when listening to motherese (t(58) = 3.22, p = .002) and machine noise (t(58) = 2.51, p = .01),
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but not silence (p = .03) or neutral speech. There were no significant differences between the infant cry and machine noise, silence, or neutral speech conditions, nor motherese (p = .04). There were no differences between motherese and the machine noise, silence, or neutral speech conditions. There was no difference between either neutral speech or machine noise and the silence condition.

Figure 2. Mean proportion score per condition. Higher value indicates more errors made per problems completed. Error bars represent the standard error.

Based on the proportion score measure, there was also an effect of gender (F(5,275) = 5.0, p = .029), and an interaction between condition and parental status (F(5,275) = 2.59, p = .026). Overall, males had an average proportion score of 0.024, and females of 0.041, showing that females made more errors per problems completed across conditions. A one-way ANOVA comparing parent and non-parent performance in each of the conditions revealed no significant differences (p-values > .13). Discussion We began this research with the intention of exploring whether whines, cries, and motherese are more distracting than other sounds and silence. The impetus for such an exploration is grounded in the similar acoustic structure of these three attachment vocalizations, and what functional implications this similarity may hold. We feel that the idea that all three exploit a similar auditory sensitivity among humans was supported here in part, and warrants future exploration.

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Whines, cries, and motherese, but not neutral speech or machine noise, are all more distracting to parent and non-parent listeners than silence. Each vocalization distracted listeners from the task at hand, solving simple math problems, in terms of overall number of problems completed. Out of the three attachment vocalizations, whining was the most distracting. Since this is the most overlooked of the three attachment vocalizations, this result shows the need for more research on the structure and effectiveness of whining in attachment relationships. If attachment vocalizations have been acoustically designed to evoke a response from a listener, one would expect such a vocalization to be even more distracting than neutral speech than to machine noise or silence. In this study, the attachment vocalizations were not more distracting than neutral speech. Perhaps using only one sample per sound condition was a limitation. That whining only was not quite significantly higher in proportion of errors made per problems than neutral speech (i.e. pvalues < .025, but not < .01) indicates that there may be something heightened in the acoustic structure of whines that makes them effective at distracting, if not directly attracting, listeners. We predicted that whines and cries would be more distracting than motherese due to their presumed manipulative intent. In absolute numbers, this was confirmed; participants completed fewest problems and had a higher proportion of errors to problems completed when listening to the whine, followed by the infant cry, and then motherese. In a statistically significant sense, this was confirmed only for whines in terms of the proportion score. Cries were not more distracting than motherese in terms of the proportion score or problems completed. In this study, we have compared the performance of men and women, and parents and non-parents when listening to attachment vocalizations. Since motherese is directed at infants and children, an extended test of the effectiveness of motherese would be to see how distracting this vocalization is to children. That all three vocalizations did not distract the listeners equally implies a continuum of distractibility in which listeners are affected differentially by different vocalizations. While motherese may be distracting, it is less so than cries or whines. Perhaps this has to do with demands on working memory, such that cries and whines require a more immediate response to threats in the environment than motherese. All three of the attachment vocalizations share similar acoustic properties, namely increased pitch, exaggerated pitch contours, and slowed production. That all three are so distracting indicates that humans may have an auditory sensitivity for such prosodic structure. Perhaps this could be better determined by manipulating each vocalization along these salient acoustic features, and determining how much one could diminish the features and still have an effect, and how much of an effect could be achieved by enhancing these features. Further, by designing sounds that exploit these same acoustic qualities, one could determine if such artificial sounds are as effective at getting the attention of adult listeners. Humans are not unique among mammals in producing and responding to attachment vocalizations. The majority of mammalian species with extended caregiving produce isolation calls functionally similar to infant cries (Newman, 2007), and some produce maternal vocalizations functionally similar to motherese, notably those species that also engage alloparents in child rearing practice (see Hrdy, 2009, chapter 4 for a review). Though whines have been noted among some social species such as dogs (Shyan, Fortune & King, 2003), these vocalizations appear much more related to

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submissive behaviors than childcare. Comparisons of maternal vocalizations and isolation calls across species are unknown to us; perceptually these vocalizations appear to follow more of a species-specific pattern acoustically. This lack of cross-species comparison offers a unique hypothesis of our assumption of shared auditory sensitivity to attachment vocalizations that of whether the effective characteristics of a species attachment vocalizations is related to the species own auditory sensitivity. An important question left unaddressed by our research concerns the origins of this attachment-related prosody. Granting that humans are differentially sensitive to these patterns of speech, speaking in these ways could arise in a combination of two ways: Human beings are behaviorally predisposed to speak in this way in attachment relations; and/or, human beings learn to speak in this way to other humans in attachment relations because it has favorable consequences. Since there were no differences between parent and non-parent participants in response to these three attachment vocalizations, we favor the former, that the production of and response to these human sounds likely occur without training, and humans are instead predisposed to respond to such attachment vocalizations. This interpretation is consistent with a theory offered by Thompson and colleagues (Dessureau, et al., 1998; Thompson, Olson, & Dessureau, 1996) that infant cries (and by extension, whining) have their origins as a deceptive signal for infant cries, a signal of respiratory distress. By accentuating the vocalization with pitch and speed manipulations, the apparent severity of the situation is heightened and the youngster becomes harder to ignore. If true, we should find the most severe manipulations of pitch and speed in specific cries and whines to evoke the most immediate responses in adult listeners. Similar to the ideas raised above, this would allow us to further explore the proposed auditory sensitivity adult listeners have for vocalizations with increased pitch, slowed production, and exaggerated pitch contours. Acknowledgements We would like to thank two volunteers for producing the samples for this study, and Emily Lescak for her help in data collection. We also thank the careful readings of the guest editor, Daniel OBrien, and two anonymous reviewers.
Received February 7, 2010; First revision received February 14, 2011; Second revision received April 26, 2011; Accepted May 1, 2011

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