|
Speech perception in rats: Use
of duration and rise time cues in labelling of the voiceless
affricate/fricative contrast and an analogous nonspeech continuum
by hooded rats. Phil Reed, Peter Howell, Stevie Sackin, and Stuart Rosen University College London, UK The voiceless affricate/fricative contrast has played an important role in developing auditory theories of speech perception. This type of theory draws some of its support from experimental data on animals. However, nothing is known about differential responding of affricate/fricative continua by animals. In the current study, the ability of hooded rats to "label" an affricate-fricative continuum was tested. Transfer (without retraining) to analogous nonspeech continua were also tested. The nonspeech continua were chosen so that if transfer occurred, it would indicate whether the animals had learned to use rise time or duration cues to differentiate affricates from fricatives. The data from all but one rat indicated that rats can disciminate between these cues, and will do so in a similar manner to human subjects. The data from all but one rat also show that the rise time of the stimulus was being employed to make the discrimination, the remaining rat appeared to use duration. Keywords: speech perception, phonemes, discrimination learning, rats, humans |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|