Newborns’ attention to socio-emotional prosodic cues from voices

Voices are among the most salient stimuli for social interactions. From birth, we can process both linguistic and socio-emotional aspects of voices, but it is not clear how these cues contribute to voice processing. Using non-nutritive sucking, we examined newborns’ attention to a nursery rhyme narrated by an actress, hummed by the same actress, and narrated by a synthesizer, thereby manipulating the weight of linguistic and socio-emotional cues. The role of prenatal auditory experiences in newborns’ response and the relation between sucking variables as well as the cognitive underlying mechanisms were also explored. Results showed an inhibition of sucking behavior in the absence of socio-emotional prosodic cues and a relationship between sucking behavior and the prenatal exposure to maternal speech and music. Moreover, sucking variables clustered into two dimensions of effort and temporal regulation. Overall, these results underscore the role of socio-emotional prosodic cues in early voice processing and its relation with prenatal auditory experience.