Tonal synchrony: the art of intuition within a maternal-infant vocal dialogue

Infant directed (ID) speech with its typical melodious features has been broadly accepted as an important building block of interaction synchrony to obtain and maintain an infant's attention and to communicate affective information to the infant before any linguistic benefits start to prevail. Recently, we reported tonal synchrony as a new dimension of interaction synchrony. During vocal mother-infant interactions the pitches of a mother, very often (84%), appear to be tonally related with the pitches of her infant in terms of harmonic series or pentatonic series (Van Puyvelde et al., 2010). Sequel research investigated the relation between tonal synchrony and the affective behavior (Tronick et al., 2005). TIPs seem to occur on important moments of change in the affective relationship between mother and infant. Openness to musical stimuli as likewise in a spontaneous mother-infant dialogue will be demonstrated an clinical applicantions will be discussed.