An acoustic template of newborn infant crying.

The durational characteristics of 10 normal infant's complete crying episodes are reported. The cries of each child were audiorecorded at 2 days postpartum and acoustically analyzed for overall occurrence of expiratory cry segments, inspiratory cry segments, and nonphonatory 'pause' segments. In general, remarkable similarity was found across infants with regard to the distributional occurrence of the cry features. Discussion focuses on the organization of newborn infant crying behavior within the milieu of a crying episode, as well as the diagnostic implications of these findings.