Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Humans produce a remarkable diversity of vocal behaviors throughout life, from innate sounds such as cry, laughter, and babble to learned, sophisticated sequences such as speech and song. Whether these diverse vocalizations share basic principles in their temporal organization remains unknown. Here, we show that, despite their distinct functions and extraordinary cultural variation, these vocalizations consistently occupy two characteristic rhythmic regimes supporting distinct functionalities. Corpus analyses revealed that, by approximately three years of age, the acoustic rhythms of speech and song settle into two distinct frequency ranges: one between 4 and 8 Hz, the other below 2 Hz. Critically, these two temporal regimes are already evident in infant cry, laughter, and babble, prior to the emergence of language and song. Sensorimotor synchronization experiments, where participants vocalized or tapped to sound sequences presented at different rates, revealed that individual vocal production exhibited maximal resonance between 4 and 8 Hz, whereas synchronization across individuals was strongest below 2 Hz. Together, these findings identify two functionally distinct sensorimotor timescales that organize diverse human vocal behavior: a faster timescale supporting stable individual vocal production and a slower timescale facilitating interpersonal synchronization.
Authors: Jing Wang, Honghua Chen, Yanchao Bi, Nai Ding
Institutions: Zhejiang University, Peking University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
Award: G8035082393
OpenAlex ID: W7166665633