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Lullaby Songs
In all cultures:
- Mothers communicate with infants using motherese, which includes lullaby songs, and, after a couple of months, infants use the same mechanism to communicate back.
- Infants can mimic their mothers’ lullaby singing—pitch and melodic contour—early in life, as young as two months of age.
- Infants pay more attention to female lullaby singing than to similar male vocalizing.
- Infants respond more attentively when mothers sing than when mothers speak.
- The lullaby as a mother-to-infant song form takes on the same characteristics.
- Songs for infants and small children constitute a distinct genre of music.
Taken together, all of these characteristics suggest that maternal singing is adaptive. The origin of the music-emotion linkage in adult humans could well be motherese, the music of mother-infant emotional communication of the infant’s survival state.