Gustafson G E, Green J A, Cleland J W
Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs 06269-1020.
Dev Psychobiol. 1994 Jan;27(1):1-9. doi: 10.1002/dev.420270102.
This study investigated the possibility that one function of the human infant's cry is to convey individual identity across distance. Six-hundred adults, having been exposed to 30 s of an infant's crying, were asked to identify this infant on the basis of other, experimentally altered, cries. The cries were altered naturally by rerecording across distance in the out-of-doors, and artificially by bandpass filtering and temporal reorganization. The individuality of cries proved remarkably robust to degradation: Only when frequencies were limited to the range of 8 to 10 kHz was recognition performance significantly impaired. It is argued that the human infant's cry, a complex signal with multiple markers of individuality, may have among its functions the communication of infants' identities across distance.
本研究探讨了人类婴儿哭声的一个功能是否是在一定距离外传达个体身份的可能性。600名成年人在听了30秒婴儿哭声后，被要求根据其他经过实验改变的哭声来识别该婴儿。哭声通过在户外不同距离重新录制自然改变，以及通过带通滤波和时间重组人为改变。结果表明，哭声的个体特征对声音质量下降具有显著的稳健性：只有当频率限制在8至10千赫兹范围内时，识别性能才会显著受损。研究认为，人类婴儿的哭声是一种具有多种个体特征标记的复杂信号，其功能之一可能是在一定距离外传达婴儿的身份信息。
