When speaking to infants, adults often produce speech that differs systematically from that
directed to other adults. To quantify the acoustic properties of this speech style across a wide …

Revealed more than two millennia ago by Pythagoras, consonance and dissonance (C/D)
are foundational concepts in music theory, perception, and aesthetics. The search for the …

People spend a substantial portion of their lives engaged in conversation, and yet, our
scientific understanding of conversation is still in its infancy. Here, we introduce a large …

Music comprises a diverse category of cognitive phenomena that likely represent both the
effects of psychological adaptations that are specific to music (eg, rhythmic entrainment) and …

Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is
universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm …

How games can make behavioural science better Skip to main content Thank you for visiting
nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best …

Human caregivers interacting with children typically modify their speech in ways that
promote attention, bonding, and language acquisition. Although this “motherese,” or child …

Speech and song have been transmitted orally for countless human generations, changing
over time under the influence of biological, cognitive, and cultural pressures. Cross-cultural …

Tonal languages differ from other languages in their use of pitch (tones) to distinguish
words. Lifelong experience speaking and hearing tonal languages has been argued to …

Importance Caregivers have long captured the attention of their infants by speaking in
motherese, a playful speech style characterized by heightened affect. Reduced attention to …