Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA.
J Acoust Soc Am. 2009 Nov;126(5):2779-87. doi: 10.1121/1.3212923.
In an attempt to test whether experience with or knowledge of language is necessary to show typical speaking rate effects in the perception of speech, budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and humans categorized stimuli from the synthetic continua /ba/-/wa/ and /bas/-/was/, with both short and long syllable-final phonemes. This comparative approach aims to shed some light on whether knowledge of language has a role in rate normalization effects, such as using duration information as an indicator of speaking rate in human speech perception. Syllable-final phoneme durations were varied, and were either temporally adjacent to the initial target (CV series) or were nonadjacent (CVC series). The birds were always influenced by syllable-final duration variation in the present experiments and displayed greater boundary shifts than humans. In humans, there was a significant boundary shift observed in the CV series, but there were no effects of duration variation in the final segment in the CVC series. The results from the birds suggest that specialized speech-based principles may not be necessary for explaining findings of grouping speech or speechlike elements in perception.
为了测试在感知言语时，是否需要具备语言经验或语言知识才能表现出典型的语速效应，我们让虎皮鹦鹉（Melopsittacus undulatus）和人类对来自于 /ba/-/wa/ 和 /bas/-/was/ 这两个连续体的刺激进行分类，其中包括短和长的音节末音素。这种比较方法旨在阐明语言知识是否在语速归一化效应中发挥作用，例如在人类言语感知中，是否将时长信息用作语速的指示符。音节末音素的时长发生了变化，并且要么与初始目标（CV 系列）时间上相邻，要么不相邻（CVC 系列）。在本实验中，鸟类始终受到音节末时长变化的影响，并且比人类表现出更大的边界移动。在人类中，在 CV 系列中观察到了显著的边界移动，但在 CVC 系列中，最后一个音节的时长变化没有影响。鸟类的结果表明，对于解释感知中言语或类言语元素的分组发现，可能不需要专门的基于言语的原则。
