THE MEANINGS OF MELODIES IN MOTHERESE IN TONE AND STRESS LANGUAGES

The study analyzes the meanings of melodic contours in maternal speech to 2-month-old infants in relation to eight interactional caregiving contexts and compares contour-context relations across tone and stress languages (Mandarin Chinese and American English). Ten American and 10 Chinese mother-infant pairs were recorded during spontaneous interactions in the laboratory. Maternal melodies were categorized by contour type and were subjected to digital acoustic analyses. Interactional caregiving contexts significantly influenced both the mothers' choice of contour types and the acoustic characteristics of individual contour types. American mothers raised their pitch and expanded pitch excursions more than Chinese mothers, but they used the same kinds of pitch contours to convey the same kinds of meanings in relation to the majority of contexts. The observed contour-context relations indicate basic contrasts of meaning and gradations along relevant dimensions of nonconscious parental care, such as arousing/soothing, turn-opening/turn-closing, approving/disapproving, and didactic modeling. The results suggest that melodic contours in parental communication with presyllabic infants represent cross-linguistic universals which may function as guiding messages in close relation to the parent's nonconscious didactic support of preverbal communication.