Data from: Decoding of baby calls: can adult humans identify the eliciting situation from emotional vocalizations of preverbal infants?

Preverbal infants often vocalize in emotionally loaded situations, yet the
communicative potential of these vocalizations is not well understood. The
aim of our study was to assess how accurately adult listeners extract
information about the eliciting situation from infant preverbal
vocalizations. Vocalizations of 19 infants aged 5-10 months were recorded
in 3 negative (Pain, Isolation, Demand for Food) and 3 positive (Play,
Reunion, After Feeding) situations. The recordings were later rated by 333
adult listeners on the scales of emotional valence and intensity.
Subsequently, the listeners assigned the eliciting situations in a forced
choice task. Listeners were almost perfectly able to discriminate whether
a recording came from a negative or a positive situation. Their
discrimination may have been based on perceived valence as they
consistently assigned higher valence when listening to positive, and lower
valence when listening to negative, recordings. Ability to identify the
particular situation within the negative or positive realm was
substantially weaker, with only three of the six situations being
discriminated above chance. The best discriminated situation, Play, was
associated with high perceived intensity. The weak qualitative
discrimination of negative situations seemed to be based on graded
perception of negative recordings, from the most intense and unpleasant
(assigned to Pain) to the least intense and least unpleasant (assigned to
Demand for Food). Parenthood and younger age, but not gender of listeners,
had weak positive effects on the accuracy of judgments. Our results
indicate that adults almost flawlessly distinguish positive and negative
infant sounds, but are rather inaccurate regarding identification of the
specific needs of the infant and may normally employ other sensory
channels to gain this information.