Application of an acoustic cry template to evaluate at-risk newborns: preliminary findings.

The durational characteristics of crying episodes produced among two groups of at-risk newborn infants are reported. The groups included preterm infants with diagnosed respiratory problems and preterm infants with diagnosed neurological problems. Each infant's complete crying episode was audio-recorded and acoustically analyzed for overall occurrence of expiratory cry segments, inspiratory cry segments, and nonphonatory 'pause' segments. Remarkable similarity was found across risk groups with regard to the distributional occurrence of the cry features. Results obtained for the at-risk infants were highly similar to those observed for normal full-term newborns. These preliminary findings are taken to suggest that temporal features of newborn crying activity reflect a basic organizational response of the nervous system which is common to both normal and at-risk infants.