Hauser M D, Newport E L, Aslin R N
Department of Psychology and Program in Neurosciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Cognition. 2001 Mar;78(3):B53-64. doi: 10.1016/s0010-0277(00)00132-3.
Previous work has shown that human adults, children, and infants can rapidly compute sequential statistics from a stream of speech and then use these statistics to determine which syllable sequences form potential words. In the present paper we ask whether this ability reflects a mechanism unique to humans, or might be used by other species as well, to acquire serially organized patterns. In a series of four experimental conditions, we exposed a New World monkey, the cotton-top tamarin (Saguinus oedipus), to the same speech streams used by Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (Science 274 (1996) 1926) with human infants, and then tested their learning using similar methods to those used with infants. Like humans, tamarins showed clear evidence of discriminating between sequences of syllables that differed only in the frequency or probability with which they occurred in the input streams. These results suggest that both humans and non-human primates possess mechanisms capable of computing these particular aspects of serial order. Future work must now show where humans' (adults and infants) and non-human primates' abilities in these tasks diverge.
先前的研究表明，人类成年人、儿童和婴儿能够迅速从一连串语音中计算出顺序统计量，然后利用这些统计量来确定哪些音节序列构成潜在的单词。在本文中，我们探讨这种能力是反映了人类独有的一种机制，还是其他物种也可能利用它来习得序列组织模式。在一系列四个实验条件下，我们让一种新大陆猴——棉顶狨（Saguinus oedipus）接触与萨夫兰、阿斯林和纽波特（《科学》274 (1996) 1926）用于人类婴儿的相同语音流，然后使用与测试婴儿类似的方法来测试它们的学习情况。和人类一样，狨猴也表现出明显的证据，能够区分仅在输入流中出现的频率或概率上有所不同的音节序列。这些结果表明，人类和非人类灵长类动物都拥有能够计算序列顺序这些特定方面的机制。现在，未来的研究必须表明人类（成年人和婴儿）和非人类灵长类动物在这些任务中的能力差异所在。
