Application of an Acoustic Cry Template to Evaluate At-Risk Newborns: Preliminary Findings

The durational characteristics of crying episodes produced among two groups of at-risk newborn infants are reported. The groups included preterm infants with diagnosed respiratory problems and preterm infants with diagnosed neurological problems. Each infant’s complete crying episode was audio-recorded and acoustically analyzed for overall occurrence of expiratory cry segments, inspiratory cry segments, and non-phonatory ‘pause’ segments. Remarkable similarity was found across risk groups with regard to the distributional occurrence of the cry features. Results obtained for the at-risk infants were highly similar to those observed for normal full-term newborns. These preliminary findings are taken to suggest that temporal features of newborn crying activity reflect a basic organizational response of the nervous system which is common to both normal and at-risk infants.