Beckers Gabriël J L
Department of Behavioural Neurobiology, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Eberhard-Gw inner-Straβe 6, 82.319 Seewiesen, Germany.
Hum Biol. 2011 Apr;83(2):191-212. doi: 10.3378/027.083.0204.
Research into speech perception by nonhuman animals can be crucially informative in assessing whether specific perceptual phenomena in humans have evolved to decode speech, or reflect more general traits. Birds share with humans not only the capacity to use complex vocalizations for communication but also many characteristics of its underlying developmental and mechanistic processes; thus, birds are a particularly interesting group for comparative study. This review first discusses commonalities between birds and humans in perception of speech sounds. Several psychoacoustic studies have shown striking parallels in seemingly speech-specific perceptual phenomena, such as categorical perception of voice-onset-time variation, categorization of consonants that lack phonetic invariance, and compensation for coarticulation. Such findings are often regarded as evidence for the idea that the objects of human speech perception are auditory or acoustic events rather than articulations. Next, I highlight recent research on the production side of avian communication that has revealed the existence of vocal tract filtering and articulation in bird species-specific vocalization, which has traditionally been considered a hallmark of human speech production. Together, findings in birds show that many of characteristics of human speech perception are not uniquely human but also that a comparative approach to the question of what are the objects of perception--articulatory or auditory events--requires careful consideration of species-specific vocal production mechanisms.
对非人类动物的语音感知进行研究，对于评估人类特定的感知现象是为解码语音而进化，还是反映更普遍的特征，可能具有至关重要的参考价值。鸟类与人类不仅都有使用复杂发声进行交流的能力，而且其潜在的发育和机制过程也有许多共同特征；因此，鸟类是进行比较研究的一个特别有趣的群体。这篇综述首先讨论鸟类和人类在语音感知方面的共性。一些心理声学研究表明，在看似特定于语音的感知现象中存在惊人的相似之处，比如对语音起始时间变化的范畴感知、对缺乏语音不变性的辅音的分类，以及对协同发音的补偿。这些发现通常被视为一种观点的证据，即人类语音感知的对象是听觉或声学事件而非发音动作。接下来，我将重点介绍近期关于鸟类交流发声方面的研究，这些研究揭示了在鸟类特定物种发声中存在声道过滤和发音动作，而传统上这被认为是人类语音产生的一个标志。综合来看，鸟类的研究结果表明，人类语音感知的许多特征并非人类所独有，而且对于感知对象是发音动作还是听觉事件这一问题采用比较方法时，需要仔细考虑物种特定的发声机制。
