Zebra finches are sensitive to prosodic features of human speech

Spierings, Michelle J.; Cate, Carel ten

doi:10.1098/rspb.2014.0480

Cited by 39 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…While earlier studies using a go/no go procedure have demonstrated that zebra finches are able to discriminate artificial stimuli differing in number, sequence, intensity or frequency profile of vocal elements (e.g., Lohr and Dooling, 1998;Spierings and ten Cate, 2014;Verzijden et al, 2007;Weisman et al, 1998), it so far has not been examined whether they can discriminate stimuli in which the relative timing of otherwise identical elements has been varied. Therefore, in our first experiment, we trained the birds to distinguish between one isochronous and one irregular stimulus.…”

Section: Experiments 1: Single Training Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

The perception of regularity in an isochronous stimulus in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and humans

Honing

Cate

2015

Behavioural Processes

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Section: Experiments 1: Single Training Stimulimentioning

confidence: 99%

The perception of regularity in an isochronous stimulus in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and humans

Honing

Cate

2015

Behavioural Processes

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“…The low number of responses to the stimuli with new items in test 6 might reflect a weakness of the test procedure of the go/no-go task that has been noted before (9,15,16,40). Because only the go training stimuli (consisting of familiar items) provided a reward, the budgerigars might quickly have learned to ignore any stimulus containing novel items.…”

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confidence: 99%

Budgerigars and zebra finches differ in how they generalize in an artificial grammar learning experiment

Spierings

Cate

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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The ability to abstract a regularity that underlies strings of sounds is a core mechanism of the language faculty but might not be specific to language learning or even to humans. It is unclear whether and to what extent nonhuman animals possess the ability to abstract regularities defining the relation among arbitrary auditory items in a string and to generalize this abstraction to strings of acoustically novel items. In this study we tested these abilities in a songbird (zebra finch) and a parrot species (budgerigar). Subjects were trained in a go/no-go design to discriminate between two sets of sound strings arranged in an XYX or an XXY structure. After this discrimination was acquired, each subject was tested with test strings that were structurally identical to the training strings but consisted of either new combinations of known elements or of novel elements belonging to other element categories. Both species learned to discriminate between the two stimulus sets. However, their responses to the test strings were strikingly different. Zebra finches categorized test stimuli with previously heard elements by the ordinal position that these elements occupied in the training strings, independent of string structure. In contrast, the budgerigars categorized both novel combinations of familiar elements as well as strings consisting of novel element types by their underlying structure. They thus abstracted the relation among items in the XYX and XXY structures, an ability similar to that shown by human infants and indicating a level of abstraction comparable to analogical reasoning.artificial grammar learning | rule learning | auditory perception | songbirds | parrots O ne of the critical features of language learning is the ability to abstract the grammatical structure from spoken language. Such abstraction allows humans to learn about regularities in their native language and to generalize these regularities to novel input. This ability is examined in a standardized way in artificial grammar learning experiments, in which humans are exposed to strings of meaningless sounds (e.g., arbitrary speech syllables) organized according to a specific grammatical structure. Several studies have shown that the ability to abstract the underlying structure from such stimuli is present in young infants (1-5) in both the acoustic and the visual domain (6-8). This domain generality and its presence at a very early age have given rise to the notion that this cognitive ability may have preceded language evolution and served as a basis for present-day linguistic complexity. If so, it raises the question to what extent this ability is confined to humans or also can be found in nonhuman animals. In this context, comparative studies on nonhuman animals are needed to reveal the level of abstraction they are able to achieve in artificial grammar learning tasks. This information might provide hypotheses about how and why the more complex human grammatical competences have arisen. The current study addresses whether two bird species, the...

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“…Further comparative research on temporal structure perception in speech with nonhuman animal species could better inform our understanding of the evolutionary path of such an ability, determining how much this ability depends on general pattern learning processes vs. speech-specific combination of cues (Ramus et al, 2000; Toro et al, 2003; Patel, 2006; Fitch, 2012; de la Mora et al, 2013; Ravignani et al, 2014; Spierings and ten Cate, 2014; Hoeschele and Fitch, 2016). …”

Section: General Discussion and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeking Temporal Predictability in Speech: Comparing Statistical Approaches on 18 World Languages

Jadoul

Ravignani

Thompson

et al. 2016

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Temporal regularities in speech, such as interdependencies in the timing of speech events, are thought to scaffold early acquisition of the building blocks in speech. By providing on-line clues to the location and duration of upcoming syllables, temporal structure may aid segmentation and clustering of continuous speech into separable units. This hypothesis tacitly assumes that learners exploit predictability in the temporal structure of speech. Existing measures of speech timing tend to focus on first-order regularities among adjacent units, and are overly sensitive to idiosyncrasies in the data they describe. Here, we compare several statistical methods on a sample of 18 languages, testing whether syllable occurrence is predictable over time. Rather than looking for differences between languages, we aim to find across languages (using clearly defined acoustic, rather than orthographic, measures), temporal predictability in the speech signal which could be exploited by a language learner. First, we analyse distributional regularities using two novel techniques: a Bayesian ideal learner analysis, and a simple distributional measure. Second, we model higher-order temporal structure—regularities arising in an ordered series of syllable timings—testing the hypothesis that non-adjacent temporal structures may explain the gap between subjectively-perceived temporal regularities, and the absence of universally-accepted lower-order objective measures. Together, our analyses provide limited evidence for predictability at different time scales, though higher-order predictability is difficult to reliably infer. We conclude that temporal predictability in speech may well arise from a combination of individually weak perceptual cues at multiple structural levels, but is challenging to pinpoint.

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Zebra finches are sensitive to prosodic features of human speech

Cited by 39 publications

References 29 publications

The perception of regularity in an isochronous stimulus in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and humans

The perception of regularity in an isochronous stimulus in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and humans

Budgerigars and zebra finches differ in how they generalize in an artificial grammar learning experiment

Seeking Temporal Predictability in Speech: Comparing Statistical Approaches on 18 World Languages

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