Kathleen Currie Hall
Notes on: Papoušek, Mechtild, Papoušek, Hanuš, & Symmes, David. (1991). The meanings of melodies in motherese in tone and stress languages. Infant behavior and development, 14, 415-440.

Summary:
In this article, the authors explore how mothers' native languages (Mandarin Chinese vs. American English) interact with the intonational contours of the utterances they produce to their 2-month-old infants.  They show that while there are some differences across individuals and languages, there are also several characteristics that point to a "universal" motherese.

Details:
1. Motherese in general is associated with a high F0 and an expanded pitch 
range, characteristics that are believed to make motherese easier for infants to process and more likely to attract and keep infants' attention.

2. 10 AE and 10 MC mother-infant dyads participated; each interacted in the lab and was audio and video-recorded.  

3. Semantic "contexts" of the interactions were encoded / transcribed without reference to the audio portions, but with reference to the actual words / sounds uttered by the participants (i.e., no prosodic info. was given).  These were then compared to prosodic F0 contours.

4. Despite some variation by subject and by language, a lot of cross-linguistic similarity was found.  Rising intonation tended to be used to elicit a child's attention and participation, and such elicitation was almost always done with a rising tone.  Soothing an infant was done with a gentle falling tone, but falling tones of other types were also used to reward a child, discourage unfavourable behaviour, and encourage imitation, play, or attention.  Rewarding a child was primarily done using a bell-shaped contour, though again this contour was used for other purposes as well.

5. Chinese tended to have more falling and bell-shaped contours than English.  English tended to do less encouragement of imitation and soothing but more rewarding and evaluating of state.

Questions:
1. I'd be interested in hearing more about the point mentioned at the very end of the article, about Chinese mothers "outwitting" the tone rules of their language.