Native Accents in Infants' Cries - A primitive mechanism to optimise caregiver responses, and the foundation of spoken language

Humans are altricial, that is - they are born in an undeveloped state, incapable of caring for themselves. They require continuous caregiver attention in order for their survival needs to be met, and this need is especially pressing shortly after birth. Crying is the neonate’s mechanism for eliciting parental care, and over evolutionary time crying has likely become optimised to achieve this. This requires adaptation in both the infant and caregiver - on the side of the infant, to produce an effective cry and on the side of the caregiver, to be driven to respond to the cry by providing nurturing responses that ensure the infant’s survival. At the heart of this project lies a bipartite question: how do the relationships between cries and caregiving develop on an evolutionary timescale and how do they develop on an ontogenetic timescale? Thus, one strand of the research aims to determine whether there is any empirical evidence for suggesting that the acoustics of neonatal cries confer a benefit to the infant, supporting an evolutionary argument for their development as a survival mechanism. A second strand is the empirical investigation of the developmental timecourse of the neural substrates that underlie the production of these, presumably optimised, neonatal cries.

Project leader: Professor Alexis Hervais-Adelman (Université de Genève)

Project duration: 12/2022 until 11/2025