Infant cry reliability: Acoustic homogeneity of spontaneous cries and pain-induced cries

• Cries of healthy infants were recorded and grouped by their type of crying.
• The average homogeneity of infant cries was computed for each group.
• Overall, most acoustic parameters have low to medium homogeneity.
• No significant differences in homogeneity between the groups were found.
• By trend, non-distressed cries are best suited for infant cry research.

Infant cries can indicate certain developmental disorders and therefore may be suited for early diagnosis. An open research question is which type of crying (spontaneous, pain-induced) is best suited for infant cry analysis. For estimating the degree of consistency among single cries in an episode of crying, healthy infants were recorded and allocated to the four groups spontaneous cries, spontaneous non-distressed cries, pain-induced cries and pain-induced cries without the first cry after pain stimulus. 19 acoustic parameters were computed and statistically analyzed on their reliability with Krippendorff’s Alpha. Krippendorff’s Alpha values between 0.184 and 0.779 were reached over all groups. No significant differences between the cry groups were found. However, the non-distressed cries reached the highest alpha values in 16 out of 19 acoustic parameters by trend. The results show that the single cries within an infant’s episode of crying are not very reliable in general. For the cry types, the non-distressed cry is the one with the best reliability making it the favorite for infant cry analysis.

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