Yoko Shimura
Dept. of Educ., Saitama Univ., 255 Shimo-Ohkubo, Urawa, 338 Japan
Satoshi Imaizumi
Univ. of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, 113 Japan
Voice samples produced by six infants at 6, 9, 12, and 17 months of age were perceptually evaluated by 79 adults (aged 20--22) and 31 children (aged 2--6) using 9-point-rating dipole scales representing emotions. The following results were obtained. (1) Both the adult and child listeners perceived rich contents of emotions from the voice samples recorded even at 6 month of age. (2) More factors were extracted from the rating scores given by the children than by the adults via factor analyses, though many characteristics of the extracted factors were common between the two listener groups. These results indicate the following. (1) Even 6-month-old infants who have not yet developed a language can produce voice necessary for emotional communication through nonlinguistic elements of voice. (2) Children are more sensitive in perception of emotions from infants' vocalization than the adults. Children seem to perceive richer emotions from infants' vocalizations than the adults.