The GIVE Database: Acoustic and Perceptual Characteristics of Infant Emotional Vocalizations in the First Year of Life

Infants communicate their affective states through a rich repertoire of preverbal vocalizations that support early social interaction and guide caregiver responsiveness. However, research on emotional infant vocalizations is limited by the lack of standardized, comprehensive, and perceptually validated datasets. To address this need, the Geneva Infant Vocalization of Emotion (GIVE) database includes 360 annotated vocalizations from infants aged 0-12 months across positive, neutral, and negative valences. Vocalizations were extracted from naturalistic parent-infant interactions, manually segmented, and annotated based on the emotional valence of the vocalization and its auditory interactional context. Acoustic features were characterized using the eGeMAPS parameter set, and a large-scale adult perceptual validation provided ratings of valence, cuteness, and aversiveness for each sound. As an example of an individual-level factor, we also examined how parenthood influences adults' perception of infant vocal emotional cues. Results reveal clear perceptual distinctions across valence categories, with acoustic properties contributing to evaluations of emotional valence, cuteness, and aversiveness. Ratings of cuteness and aversiveness further differentiated vocalization categories, while age-related variation in responses to vocalizations produced by infants of different ages, alongside differences associated with parental status, illustrates GIVE's potential for investigating developmental and experiential influences on the interpretation of infant vocalizations. A subset of 120 experimentally validated vocalizations, representative of the full set, was selected and acoustically characterized, providing a resource for research on early emotional communication, parental sensitivity, neuroimaging, and computational modeling of infant vocal behavior.