Perception of synthetic /ba/–/wa/ speech continuum by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus)
作者:
Micheal L. Dent,
Elizabeth F. Brittan-Powell,
Robert J. Dooling,
Alisa Pierce,
期刊:
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
(AIP Available online 1997)
卷期:
Volume 102,
issue 3
页码: 1891-1897
ISSN:0001-4966
年代: 1997
DOI:10.1121/1.420111
出版商: Acoustical Society of America
数据来源: AIP
摘要:
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.
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