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The Feline Isolation Call

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Abstract

The vocalization of the human neonate has been called an ‘acoustical umbilical cord’ insofar as it serves as a primary survival mechanism in obtaining food, warmth, and comfort for the otherwise helpless infant. Through these vocalizations, which utilize only variations in pitch, duration and intensity for differences in meaning, the infant signals different emotional and affective messages to caregivers. For the first six to nine months of life, this form of communication comprises a universal language common to all infants and independent of cultural bias (Olney and Scholnick, 1975). Subsequently, phoneme imitation and word production begin to obscure this prelinguistic form of communication and, with the development of a vocabulary, a grammar, and a syntax, a qualitatively different, culturally-bound linguistic communication system emerges.

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© 1988 Plenum Press, New York

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Buchwald, J.S., Shipley, G., Altafullah, I., Hinman, C., Harrison, J., Dickerson, L. (1988). The Feline Isolation Call. In: Newman, J.D. (eds) The Physiological Control of Mammalian Vocalization. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1051-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1051-8_8

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-8310-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-1051-8

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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