neurodudes

Juan M. Toro, Josep B. Trobalon, and Nuria Sebastian-Galles. Effects of Backward Speech and Speaker Variability in Language Discrimination by Rats. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes 2005, Vol. 31, No. 1. DOI: 10.1037/0097-7403.31.1.95

ABSTRACT:

Human infants use prosodic cues present in speech to extract language regularities, and it has been suggested that this capacity is anchored in more general mechanisms that are shared across mammals. This study explores the extent to which rats can generalize prosodic cues that have been extracted from a training corpus to new sentences and how this discrimination process is affected by the normalization of the sentences when multiple speakers are introduced. Conditions 1 and 2 show rats abilities to use prosodic cues present in speech, allowing them to discriminate between sentences not previously heard. But this discrimination is not possible when sentences are played backward. Conditions 3 and 4 show that language discrimination by rats is also taxed by the process of speaker normalization. These findings have remarkable parallels with data from human adults, human newborns, and cotton-top tamarins. Implications for speech perception by humans are discussed.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2005 at 5:29 pm by Bayle Shanks and is filed under Animal cognition, Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.