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Affective prosody: Whence motherese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2005

Marilee Monnot ,
Robert Foley  and
Elliott Ross
Marilee Monnot*
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, College of Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK73104
Robert Foley*
Affiliation:
Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, University of Cambridge, CambridgeCB2 3DZ, United Kingdomhttp://www.human-evol.cam.ac.uk/
Elliott Ross*
Affiliation:
Department of Neurology, College of Medicine, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, OK73104
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
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Abstract:

Motherese is a form of affective prosody injected automatically into speech during caregiving solicitude. Affective prosody is the aspect of language that conveys emotion by changes in tone, rhythm, and emphasis during speech. It is a neocortical function that allows graded, highly varied vocal emotional expression. Other mammals have only rigid, species-specific, limbic vocalizations. Thus, encephalization with corticalization is necessary for the evolution of progressively complex vocal emotional displays.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , August 2004 , pp. 518 - 519
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

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References

Notes

1. Personal communication from Janette Wallis, Ph.D., based on years of observing chimpanzees at Gombe Stream and other chimpanzee settings (wild and captive populations).