The acoustics of children's laughter

Abstract

Laughter is a unique sound--one that most of us produce many times each day. Despite laughter's seeming ubiquity, though, we really do not know much about this vocalization's psychological function(s) or details about its acoustics. The goal of the proposed research is to measure several acoustic features from a large corpus of children's laughter, with the goal being to catalog what makes this class of vocalizations arguably special. Through duration and frequency analyses we predict that due to their comparatively underdeveloped vocal-production anatomy, children's laughter will have a much higher F0 than adult laughter and will not expect sex differences. We also predict that children's laughter may be more tightly coupled to internal emotional state seems to be the case for adult laughter.