Spectrum Analysis of Cry Sounds in Preterm and Full-Term Infants

The 2014 Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing ROCLING 2014, pp. 193-203 The Association for Computational Linguistics and Chinese Language Processing Spectrum Analysis of Cry Sounds in Preterm and Full-Term Infants Li-mei Chen1, Yu-Hsuan Yang1, Chyi-Her Lin2, Yuh-Jyh Lin2, Yung-Chieh Lin2 Abstract Long-time average spectrum (LTAS) was used to analyze the cry phonations of 26 infants under four months old; 16 of them are full-term and the other 10 infants are preterm. The results of first spectral peak, mean spectral energy, spectral tilt, high frequency energy were used to compare the cry phonatory between full-term and preterm infants. In addition, cry duration and percent phonation is also compared. According to previous studies, full-term and preterm infants’ crying behavior show significant differences because immature neurological development of preterm infants. Major findings in this study are: (1) There was no significant difference in unedited cry phonation across groups; (2) There was no significant difference in percent phonation across groups; (3) There was no significant difference in first spectral peak across groups, and no significant difference within groups could be found. However, full-term infants have higher first spectral peak than that of preterm infants; (4) There was no significant difference in mean spectral energy across groups, yet there was a significant main effect for partition; (5) There was no significant difference in spectral tilt across groups. Post hoc comparisons identified higher spectral tilt in P2 than in P3 in the full-term infants; (6) There was no significant difference in high frequency energy across groups. Significant differences were observed across partition, and in both groups, P1 had higher HFE than P3. The differences in the measures of crying behavior between full-term and preterm infants can help to estimate health condition of infants who are under 4 months old. Keywords: Long-time average spectrum, Infant cry, Preterm infants 1. Introduction Previous studies show that preterm infants are prone to immaturity of neurological development which leads to their sensitiveness toward pain stimulation, and the greater pain they suffer would reflect on crying behavior. If a set of distinctive measures can be identified, it might be possible to differentiate infant cries in the spectrum of normative behavior and cries due to organic pathology. The measures 1 Department of Foreign Languages, National Cheng Kung University 2 Department of Pediatrics, Medical College, National Cheng Kung University 193 would be helpful for doctors and caregivers to identify if the unknown cries are caused by just infant colic or other more complicated factors. Long-time average spectrum (LTAS) of crying behavior were analyzed in two groups of newborn infants in this study. LTAS was used to analyze the infant’s non-partitioned crying episode (NP), as well as the 3 equal-length partitions (P1, P2, P3). First spectral peak (FSP), mean spectral energy (MSE), spectral tilt (ST), and high frequency energy (HFE) were measured. Colic strikes infants who are under four months old, and it makes the infants cry in the evening on a daily bases or at the moment of waking up (Lester, Boukydis, …

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