Kathleen Wermke

University of Wuerzburg | JMU · Center for Pre-Speech Development & Developmental Disorders

Introduction: The fundamental frequency contour (melody) of cry and non-cry utterances become more complex with age. However, there is a lack of longitudinal analyses of melody development during the first year of life. Objective: The aim of the study is to longitudinally analyse melody development in typical vocalisation types across the first...

Objectives Temporal and fundamental frequency (fo) variations in infant cries provide critical insights into the maturity of vocal control and hearing performances. Earlier research has examined the use of vocalisation properties (in addition to hearing tests) to identify infants at risk of hearing impairment. The aim of this study was to determine...

In early infancy, melody provides the most salient prosodic element for language acquisition and there is huge evidence for infants’ precocious aptitudes for musical and speech melody perception. Yet, a lack of knowledge remains with respect to melody patterns of infants’ vocalisations. In a search for developmental regularities of cry and non-cry...

Introduction: Perception and memorizing of melody and rhythm start about the third trimester of gestation. Infants have astonishing musical predispositions, and melody contour is most salient for them. Objective: To longitudinally analyse melody contour of spontaneous crying of healthy infants and to identify melodic intervals. The aim was 3-fol...

The purpose of this research study was to evaluate the earliest markers of vocal functioning and neurological development in infants with isolated oral cleft of the lip and/or palate (iCL/P). Participants were recruited through advertisements and clinic visits at a local mid-western university. A total of eight participants (four unaffected and fou...

Purpose Instances of laryngeal constriction have been noted as a feature of infant vocal development. The purpose of this study was to directly evaluate the developmental occurrence of laryngeal constriction phenomena in infant crying, cooing, and babbling vocalizations. Method The cry and noncry vocalizations of 20 healthy term-born infants betwe...

Objective To evaluate the flexibility of respiratory behavior during spontaneous crying using an objective analysis of temporal measures in healthy neonates. Participants A total of 1,375 time intervals, comprising breath cycles related to the spontaneous crying of 72 healthy, full-term neonates (35 females) aged between two and four days, were an...

Contribution to Special Issue on Fast effects of steroids. Human infants are the most proficient of the few vocal learner species. Sharing similar principles in terms of the generation and modification of complex sounds, cross-vocal learner comparisons are a suitable strategy when it comes to better understanding the evolution and mechanisms of aud...

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to quantitatively analyse pre-speech/early language skills in healthy full-term infants with moderate or severe deformational plagiocephaly (DP) and in infants without any skull asymmetry. Methods: At 6 and 12 months, 51 children with DP (41 moderate, 10 severe cases) were studied, along with 15 infants ser...

The foetal environment is filled with a variety of noises. Among the manifold sounds of the maternal respiratory, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular systems, the intonation properties of the maternal language are well perceived by the foetus, whose hearing system is already functioning during the last trimester of gestation. These intonation (melo...

Background: There is overwhelming evidence that auditory processing plays an important role at the beginning of language development. This contradicts long held opinion by some researchers and parents that early vocal development is innate and does not require auditory input. Consequently, vocalizations such as cooing or pre-canonical babbling do n...

Background: Having had ample opportunity to become acquainted with their mother’s voice melody in the womb, newborns have been found to exhibit salient ‘musical’ elements in their own cry melodies. Musical interval-like substructures have also been observed in young infants crying. The aim of the study was to answer the question of whether interval...

Objectives: The recommendation of a supine sleeping position led to a significant reduction of SIDS, but increased positional skull deformities (DP). Here, a quantitative analysis of babbling aims to complement previous studies of language-relevant competence based on items of the Bayley-scales that suggested the presence of developmental language...

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the developmental occurrence of inspiratory phonations (IPs) in the spontaneous cries of healthy infants across the first 10 weeks of life. Study design: This is a populational retrospective study. Participants: The spontaneous crying of 17 healthy infants (10 were male) was retrospectively investigated....

Gender-dependent differentiation of the brain at morphological, neurochemical and functional levels of organization have been shown to be primarily controlled by sex differences in gonadal hormone concentrations during pre- and early postnatal development. Indeed, previous studies have reported that pre- and perinatal hormonal environments influenc...

Objectives: This study examined whether prenatal exposure to either a tonal or a nontonal maternal language affects fundamental frequency (fo) properties in neonatal crying. Study design: This is a population prospective study. Participants: A total of 102 neonates within the first week of life served as the participants. Methods: Spontaneou...

Objective: Evaluate the fundamental frequency (fo) variabilty of spontaneous cries produced by neonates with tonal (Lamnso) and non-tonal (German) ambient language.Study Design: Populational prospective study.Participants: A total of 21 German infants (10 male) and 21 Cameroon (Nso) infants (10 male) within the first week of life served as particip...

Objective: To evaluate whether the puberty-like sex hormone surge during the first months of life (mini-puberty) affects fundamental frequency (fo) in infant crying as one would derive from hormone influences on voice in adults. Study design: Populational prospective study. Participants: Twenty healthy normal-hearing infants (nine boys) were r...

Summary: Objective. To evaluate whether the puberty-like sex hormone surge during the first months of life (minipuberty) affects fundamental frequency (fo) in infant crying as one would derive from hormone influences on voice inadults. Study Design. Populational prospective study. Participants. Twenty healthy normal-hearing infants (nine boys) were...

Neonatal crying is far more than an innate biological alarm mechanism employing acoustic signals and reserved exclusively for the communication of emergency and distress. As they have been more closely identified in recent years, the principles of cry melody development allow us to class infant cries with other forms of non-cry vocalizations as ess...

To evaluate the developmental occurrence of subharmonic (SH) and noise (N) phenomena and to quantify their extent in the spontaneous cries of healthy infants across the first 3 months. Populational prospective study. Spontaneous elicited cries from 20 infants (10 male) were repeatedly recorded across the first 3 months of life. Frequency spectra an...

The specific impact of sex hormones on brain development and acoustic communication is known from animal models. Sex steroid hormones secreted during early development play an essential role in hemispheric organization and the functional lateralization of the brain, e.g. language. In animals, these hormones are well-known regulators of vocal motor...

The recurrent 10q22.3q23.2 deletion with breakpoints within low copy repeats 3 and 4 is a rare genomic disorder, reported in only 13 patients to date. The phenotype is rather uncharacteristic, which makes a clinical diagnosis difficult. A phenotypic feature described in almost all patients is a delay in speech development, albeit systematic studies...

Little is known about the influence of cultural factors on early vocal development. This study aims to investigate comfort sounds of infants reared in very different cultural environments, namely Cameroonian Nso and German. These cultures differ not only with respect to their languages, but also with respect to the amount of language used in early...

Using frequent recordings of spontaneous vocalizations from cooing to word production and applying signal analysis methods, we aimed to objectively determine the developmental pre-speech profiles of young hearing-impaired infants with regard to the duration of auditory deprivation and the benefit accrued from hearing aids. The assessment of the ben...

To investigate cry melody properties in infants with clefts using objective methods and to identify early differences in cry development in relation to infants without clefts that may indicate special developmental risks. Melody analysis was carried out on cries from the second month of life. The cry properties of infants with a cleft lip and palat...

Music and rhythm have been defined as powerful aids to language learning, memory, and recall. But is this due to structural and motivational properties of instrumental music and songs or is there a relation between learners’ language aptitude and musical intelligence? It seems that everyone who feels motivated to do it is able to learn other langua...

Human fetuses are able to memorize auditory stimuli from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language. Newborns prefer their mother's voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech ("mother...

The objective of this study was to determine the influence of fetal growth on the fundamental frequency (F(0)) of neonatal crying in a group of healthy full-term infants. The spontaneous cries of 131 infants were audio recorded during the first week of life, and subsequently submitted to acoustic analyses. The individual cry utterances produced by...

Crying is the earliest sound production of human infants on their long way toward language. Here, we argue that infants' early crying contains melodic constituents for both musical and prosodic structures. This view is based on our findings that cry melodies become increasingly complex during the first months of life and, that complex cry melodies...

Already the earliest sounds of newborns and young infants exhibit a rich repertoire of melodic and rhythmic pattern. The diversity of these patterns in cries and early non-cry vocalizations samples most of the possible prosodic structures that speech will later employ. Systematic, rule-based changes of sound properties during the first months of li...

This paper addresses the problem of classification of infants with cleft palate. A hidden Markov model (HMM)-based cry classification algorithm is presented. A parallel HMM (PHMM) for coping with age masking, based on a maximum-likelihood decision rule, is introduced. The performance of the proposed algorithm under different model parameters and di...

This study is part of the German Language Development Study's prospective longitudinal research programme on infants from birth until the age of 3 years. Thirty-four infants were retrospectively classified into two groups (normal/delayed) by their language skills at 2.5 years of age. Frequency spectrograms and melodies of about 11,000 cries from th...

Understanding cultural evolution is one of the most challenging and indispensable scientific tasks for the survival of humankind on our planet. This task demands, besides an adoption of theories and models from biological evolution, theories for culture-specific processes as well. Language evolution and language acquisition offer interesting object...

The stormy development of vocal production during the first postnatal weeks is generally underestimated. Our longitudinal studies revealed an amazingly fast unfolding and combinatorial complexification of pre-speech melodies. We argue that relying on “melody” could provide for the immature brain a kind of filter to extract life-relevant information...

In a former study [Wermke et al., Med. Eng. Phys. 24, 501–514 (2002)], an increasing tuning between laryngeal(melody) and pharyngeal (resonance frequencies) activity was demonstrated during pre‐speech development. This tuning was observed unexpectedly early during development in mitigated cries and earliest non‐cry utterances and prepares probably...

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Since the beginning of the 1960's efforts have been made to characterize pathologies in infants' cries. In various pathologies such as brain damage, cleft palate, hydrocephalus, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and many other diseases, special cry characteristics have been reported. The studies performed on the subject (most employing manual ti...

This paper deals with the analysis of cry melodies (time variations of the fundamental frequency) as well as vocal tract resonance frequencies (formants) from infant cry signals. The increase of complexity of cry melodies is a good indicator for neuro-muscular maturation as well as for the evaluation of pre-speech development. The variation of form...

Studies in the field of cry diagnosis have concentrated on the fundamental frequency (F(0)) and related parameters as suitable predictors for an at-risk status of the infant for a CNS dysfunction, mostly reflected in an increased F(0). The high variability of F(0) in infant cries is a limiting factor to develop cry analysis as a non-invasive tool f...

The objectives of the present study were: (1) to analyze the cry features of infants with cleft lip and palate (UCLP) by means of spectral analysis, (2) to describe changes of the acoustic parameters from birth until 9 months of age, and (3) to compare these data with existing cry data of infants without cleft (control group). The study was designe...

Objective The objectives of the present study were: (1) to analyze the cry features of infants with cleft lip and palate (UCLP) by means of spectral analysis, (2) to describe changes of the acoustic parameters from birth until 9 months of age, and (3) to compare these data with existing cry data of infants without cleft (control group). Design The...

Berlin, Humboldt-Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2002 (Nicht für den Austausch).

It is well known that the cry sound produced by an infant conveys information concerning the infant's health or needs. In this paper, an Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based system for classification and monitoring of infants cry is presented. Classification tests among seven infants with cleft palate, with/without a palatal plate were performed in thre...

Einleitung und Methode Unter Verwendung der Daten von 1,8 Millionen Einlingsgeburten der Jahre 1995 bis 1997 in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland erfolgt die Berechnung einer einheitlichen gesamtdeutschen Normwertkurve für das Geburtsgewicht von 20 - 43 Schwangerschaftswochen. Diese Werte zeigen eine sehr gute Übereinstimmung mit der deutschen Standar...

Fragestellung Die Frage, ob für die Charakterisierung von Wachstumsverläufen von Zwillingen die bekannten Einlingsperzentilkurven verwendet werden können, oder nicht, ist bisher nicht entschieden. Obwohl bereits verschiedene Autoren auf der Grundlage eigener Untersuchungen vorschlagen, zwillingsspezifische Wachstumskurven zu verwenden, warnen ander...

Chronobiology is the discipline involving the study of the time structure of living creatures. Since it has been shown that there is non-chaotic recurrence, at precise intervals of time, of different functions from unicellular level to complex human systems, rhythmometric evaluation of key activities such as the activity-rest and sleeping-waking cy...

Introduction and objectives. Chronobiology is the discipline involving the study of the time structure of living creatures. Since it has been shown that there is non-chaotic recurrence, at precise intervals of time, of different functions from unicellular level to complex human systems, rhythmometric evaluation of key activities such as the activit...

In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden auf der Basis einer anthropometrischen Erhebung an 80000 Zwillingen neu errechnete Perzentilwerte für die gebräuchlichen Biometriemaße Geburtsgewicht, Länge und Kopfumfang ab der 21. vollendeten Schwangerschaftswoche vorgestellt. Das umfangreiche Datenmaterial stammt aus der bundesweiten Perinatalerfassung der Jahr...

Twin gestations require different normal values than singleton pregnancies. The aim of this study was to define percentiles of birth weight, length and head circumference for twin pregnancies according to gestational age. 80 000 twins born at 21 to 42 weeks' gestation between 1990 and 1995 in Germany of German citizens were analyzed. Percentiles we...

The study analyzed changes of cry characteristics of twins using spectrograms, fundamental frequency contours (melody), and several indicators of microvariability of the fundamental frequency (F0) calculated with the aid of a KAY Elemetrics CSL Model 4305. Subjects were 15 identical and 15 fraternal healthy twin pairs, whose spontaneous utterances...

First Page of the Article

First Page of the Article

Paralysis, laryngitis, cancer and other pathological conditions often lead to irregularities in the sounds of speech. Many of these irregularities seem related to intrinsic nonlinearities in the vibrations of the vocal cords and may thus be understood in terms of the concepts of nonlinear dynamics. In this paper, we analyze examples of newborn infa...

Several cries of newborn infants are analyzed using computer spectrograms and methods from nonlinear dynamics. A rich variety of bifurcations (e.g. period doubling) and episodes of irregular behaviour are observed. Poincaré sections and the analysis of the underlying attractor suggest that these noise-like episodes are low-dimensional deterministic...

Pain cries of 42 infants during the first week of life were investigated by signal analysis methods, extracting the time variations of the fundamental frequency [melody] with high accuracy in frequency and time. Several methods are proposed to define measures for the variability of this melody. We tested the suitability of these measures as indicat...

Berlin, Humboldt-Univ., Diss. A, 1987 (Nicht f.d. Austausch).