Automated analysis of newborn cry: relationships between melodic shapes and native language

Multi-modal analysis of infant cry types characterization: Acoustics, body language and brain signals

BACKGROUND

Infant crying is the first attempt babies use to communicate during their initial months of life. A misunderstanding of the cry message can compromise infant care and future neurodevelopmental process.

METHODS

An exploratory study collecting multimodal data (i.e., crying, electroencephalography (EEG), near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), facial expressions, and body movements) from 38 healthy full-term newborns was conducted. Cry types were defined based on different conditions (i.e., hunger, sleepiness, fussiness, need to burp, and distress). Statistical analysis, Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) techniques were used to identify relevant features for cry type classification and to evaluate a robust DL algorithm named Acoustic MultiStage Interpreter (AMSI).

RESULTS

Significant differences were found across cry types based on acoustics, EEG, NIRS, facial expressions, and body movements. Acoustics and body language were identified as the most relevant ML features to support the cause of crying. The DL AMSI algorithm achieved an accuracy rate of 92%.

CONCLUSIONS

This study set a precedent for cry analysis research by highlighting the complexity of newborn cry expression and strengthening the potential use of infant cry analysis as an objective, reliable, accessible, and non-invasive tool for cry interpretation, improving the infant-parent relationship and ensuring family well-being.

How Tone, Intonation and Emotion Shape the Development of Infants’ Fundamental Frequency Perception

Fundamental frequency (ƒ₀), perceived as pitch, is the first and arguably most salient auditory component humans are exposed to since the beginning of life. It carries multiple linguistic (e.g., word meaning) and paralinguistic (e.g., speakers’ emotion) functions in speech and communication. The mappings between these functions and ƒ₀ features vary within a language and differ cross-linguistically. For instance, a rising pitch can be perceived as a question in English but a lexical tone in Mandarin. Such variations mean that infants must learn the specific mappings based on their respective linguistic and social environments. To date, canonical theoretical frameworks and most empirical studies do not view or consider the multi-functionality of ƒ₀, but typically focus on individual functions. More importantly, despite the eventual mastery of ƒ₀ in communication, it is unclear how infants learn to decompose and recognize these overlapping functions carried by ƒ₀. In this paper, we review the symbioses and synergies of the lexical, intonational, and emotional functions that can be carried by ƒ₀ and are being acquired throughout infancy. On the basis of our review, we put forward the Learnability Hypothesis that infants decompose and acquire multiple ƒ₀ functions through native/environmental experiences. Under this hypothesis, we propose representative cases such as the synergy scenario, where infants use visual cues to disambiguate and decompose the different ƒ₀ functions. Further, viable ways to test the scenarios derived from this hypothesis are suggested across auditory and visual modalities. Discovering how infants learn to master the diverse functions carried by ƒ₀ can increase our understanding of linguistic systems, auditory processing and communication functions.

Machine Learning-Based Cry Diagnostic System for Identifying Septic Newborns

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Processing the newborns' cry audio signal (CAS) provides valuable information about the newborns' condition. This information can be used to diagnose the disease. This article analyzes the CASs of newborns under two months old using machine learning approaches to develop an automatic diagnostic system for identifying septic infants from healthy ones. Septic infants have not been studied in this context.

METHODOLOGY

The proposed features include Mel frequency cepstral coefficients and the prosodic features of tilt, rhythm, and intensity. The performance of each feature set was evaluated using a collection of classifiers, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), decision tree, and discriminant analysis. We also examined the majority voting method for improving the classification results and feature manipulation and multiple classifier framework, which has not previously been reported in the literature on developing an automatic diagnostic system based on the infant's CAS. We tested our methodology on two datasets of expiration and inspiration episodes of newborns' CASs.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION

The framework of the concatenation of all feature sets using quadratic SVM resulted in the best F-score with 86% for the expiration dataset. Furthermore, the framework of tilt feature set with quadratic discriminant with 83.90% resulted in the best F-score for inspiration. We found out that septic infants cry differently than healthy infants through these experiments. Thus, our proposed method can be used as a noninvasive tool for identifying septic infants from healthy ones only based on their CAS.

Typical language development

Acquiring language is a major developmental feat that all typical, healthy children achieve during the first years of their lives. The ease and speed with which they acquire their native language(s) has puzzled parents, scholars, and the general public alike. The last five decades have brought about a spectacular increase in our knowledge of how young infants acquire their mother tongues. Sophisticated behavioral, corpus-based, and brain imaging techniques have been developed to query young learners' journey into language. This chapter summarizes what we currently know of typical language development during the first years of life. It starts out by reviewing the existing theoretical accounts of language development. It then presents the most important empirical findings about speech perception and language acquisition grouped by different subdomains, such as newborns' speech perception abilities, phoneme perception, word learning, and the early acquisition of grammar, focusing mainly on the first 3 years of life, an age by which the major milestones of language development are typically accomplished. Differences between monolingual and multilingual development are also discussed.