melizabeth wrote:

"Emily" wrote in message
news:vCP_b.52882$4o.71701@attbi_s52...

melizabeth wrote:


I got this article from the February 17th edition of the ASHA leader
(American Speech-Language Hearing Association).

In a series of experiments on a pregnant ewe designed to record exactly

what

sounds reach the fetal ear, University of Florida researcher have

bolstered

previous findings suggesting that human fetuses likely hear mostly
low-frequency rather than high-frequency sounds. that means they hear
vowels rather than consonants and are more sensitive to the melodic

parts of

speech than to pitch, said Ken Gerhardt, professor of communication

sciences

and disorders and an associate dean of the graduate school, who led the
research reported in the November/December issues of the journal

Audiology

and Neuro Otology. Visit www.napa.ufl.edu/ufnews for details about the
research.


What could "melodic parts of speech" be if not pitch??

--
Emily
mom to Toby 5/1/02
#2 EDD 7/19/04


Good question, and my guess what they meant was the up and down intonations
(melodic intonations) of our voices during speech, rather than how high or
low our voice sounds to the fetus.

Did that make sense?


My understanding of how this works (and I'm a linguist, though
not a phonetician) is that if you can hear one, you can hear the
other. That is, if higher pitches aren't audible, then the baby
would only hear you when you're talking lower, or the lower parts
if you're using a big and variable pitch range.

--
Emily
mom to Toby 5/1/02
#2 EDD 7/19/04
,