Perception of synthetic /ba/-/wa/ speech continuum by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus).

@article{citeulike:513498, abstract = {Other than humans, extensive vocal learning has only been widely demonstrated in birds. Moreover, there are only a handful of avian species that are known to be good mimics of human speech. One such species is the budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus), which is a popular mimic of human speech and learns new vocalizations throughout adult life. Using operant conditioning procedures with a repeating background task, we tested budgerigars on the discrimination of tokens from two synthetic /ba/-/wa/ speech continua that differed in syllable, but not transition, duration. Budgerigars showed a significant improvement in discrimination performance on both continua near the phonetic boundary for humans. Budgerigars also showed a shift in the location of the phonetic boundary with a change in syllable length, similar to what has been described for humans and other primates. These results on a nonmammalian species provide support for the operation of a general, nonphonetic, auditory process as one mechanism which can lead to the well-known stimulus-length effect in humans.}, address = {Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park 20742, USA.}, author = {Dent, M. L. and Brittan-Powell, E. F. and Dooling, R. J. and Pierce, A. }, citeulike-article-id = {513498}, comment = {for dick aslin's class}, issn = {0001-4966}, journal = {J Acoust Soc Am}, keywords = {animal, categorical\_perception, language, perception, phonetics, speech}, month = {September}, number = {3}, pages = {1891--1897}, posted-at = {2006-02-20 18:37:48}, priority = {3}, title = {Perception of synthetic /ba/-/wa/ speech continuum by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus).}, url = {http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9301066}, volume = {102}, year = {1997} }

TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:513498 L3 - citeulike-article-id:513498 TI - Perception of synthetic /ba/-/wa/ speech continuum by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus). JF - J Acoust Soc Am VL - 102 IS - 3 SP - 1891 EP - 1897 AD - Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park 20742, USA. SN - 0001-4966 N2 - Other than humans, extensive vocal learning has only been widely demonstrated in birds. Moreover, there are only a handful of avian species that are known to be good mimics of human speech. One such species is the budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus), which is a popular mimic of human speech and learns new vocalizations throughout adult life. Using operant conditioning procedures with a repeating background task, we tested budgerigars on the discrimination of tokens from two synthetic /ba/-/wa/ speech continua that differed in syllable, but not transition, duration. Budgerigars showed a significant improvement in discrimination performance on both continua near the phonetic boundary for humans. Budgerigars also showed a shift in the location of the phonetic boundary with a change in syllable length, similar to what has been described for humans and other primates. These results on a nonmammalian species provide support for the operation of a general, nonphonetic, auditory process as one mechanism which can lead to the well-known stimulus-length effect in humans. KW - animal KW - categorical_perception KW - language KW - perception KW - phonetics KW - speech N1 - for dick aslin's class AU - Dent, ML AU - Brittan-Powell, EF AU - Dooling, RJ AU - Pierce, A PY - 1997/09// UR - http://view.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9301066 ER -