Baby cries and dog barks

Are nonlinear vocal phenomena as distracting as people think? Andrey Anikin, ORCID Icon Bioacoustics The International Journal of Animal Sound and its Recording (18 Sep 2025)

Keywords

Roughness    vocal communication    attention    infant cries    auditory salience    nonlinear vocal phenomena

Abstract

What makes baby cries, dog barks and piercing screams so disturbing and difficult to ignore? A common explanation is that their salience is enhanced by vocal roughness and unpredictability caused by irregular phonation. A comprehensive investigation in ten perceptual experiments confirmed that human listeners found nonlinear vocal phenomena (NLP: frequency jumps, amplitude modulation, subharmonics and chaos) distracting and annoying in baby cries and nonverbal vocalisations of adults, including both original recordings and resynthesised versions with manipulated NLP. At least for the tested range of vocalisations, the distraction and annoyance were primarily caused by irregular, rough voice quality during episodes of NLP, and only secondarily by unpredictability and bifurcations between phonatory regimes. In contrast to their clear effects on subjective ratings, NLP had a limited impact on the allocation of attention in dichotic listening tasks, and their presence did not noticeably enhance distraction from the main task in experiments using serial recall and speeded classification. Thus, while irregular phonation typical of distressed baby cries and many animal calls is experienced as unpleasant and subjectively distracting, listeners may be surprisingly adept at blocking or actively avoiding such distractors.

 

Selected readings

• "Canine intonations" (3/21/22)
• "Annoyed dog responding to the Islamic 'Call to Prayer'" (12/29/15) — this is a classic, but presently not available on YouTube.  Does anyone know where else it might be found? [UPDATE 9/22/22:  found it here]
• "Canine backtalk" (10/25/19) — this darling dog could have a conversation of sorts with Izzy, but they speak different lects.
• "Talking seals and singing dogs" (11/28/03)
• If you do a search on    "language log" dog barks        you'll find a lot more posts on talking dogs.
• "Baby talk" (12/21/10)
• "Baby talk, part 2" (8/19/18)
• "The babbling phase: ranting toddler speaks out" (9/2/10)
• "Ask LL: parents' beliefs or infants' abilities?" (10/29/09)
• "Native wails" (11/6/09)

First paragraph:

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"Newborns cry in their native language". "Babies cry with an accent within the first week of life". "Babies cry wiith the same 'prosody' or melody used in their native language by the second day of life". "Newborn babies mimic the intonation of their native tongue when they cry". "French babies cry in French, German babies cry in German and, no doubt, the wail of an English infant betrays the distinct tones of a soon-to-be English speaker".

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[Thanks to Ted McClure]