Kriengwatana Buddhamas, Escudero Paola, Ten Cate Carel
Behavioural Biology, Institute for Biology Leiden, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands ; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands.
The MARCS Institute, University of Western Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2015 Jan 13;5:1543. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01543. eCollection 2014.
The extent to which human speech perception evolved by taking advantage of predispositions and pre-existing features of vertebrate auditory and cognitive systems remains a central question in the evolution of speech. This paper reviews asymmetries in vowel perception, speaker voice recognition, and speaker normalization in non-human animals - topics that have not been thoroughly discussed in relation to the abilities of non-human animals, but are nonetheless important aspects of vocal perception. Throughout this paper we demonstrate that addressing these issues in non-human animals is relevant and worthwhile because many non-human animals must deal with similar issues in their natural environment. That is, they must also discriminate between similar-sounding vocalizations, determine signaler identity from vocalizations, and resolve signaler-dependent variation in vocalizations from conspecifics. Overall, we find that, although plausible, the current evidence is insufficiently strong to conclude that directional asymmetries in vowel perception are specific to humans, or that non-human animals can use voice characteristics to recognize human individuals. However, we do find some indication that non-human animals can normalize speaker differences. Accordingly, we identify avenues for future research that would greatly improve and advance our understanding of these topics.
人类语音感知在多大程度上通过利用脊椎动物听觉和认知系统的倾向及已有特征而进化，仍然是语音进化中的一个核心问题。本文综述了非人类动物在元音感知、说话者声音识别和说话者归一化方面的不对称性——这些主题尚未就非人类动物的能力进行充分讨论，但却是语音感知的重要方面。在本文中，我们证明了在非人类动物中探讨这些问题是相关且有价值的，因为许多非人类动物在其自然环境中必须处理类似的问题。也就是说，它们也必须区分听起来相似的发声，从发声中确定信号发出者的身份，并解决同种个体发声中依赖信号发出者的变异。总体而言，我们发现，尽管有一定合理性，但目前的证据还不够有力，无法得出元音感知中的方向性不对称是人类特有的，或者非人类动物可以利用声音特征识别人类个体的结论。然而，我们确实发现了一些迹象表明非人类动物可以对说话者差异进行归一化。因此，我们确定了未来研究的方向，这将极大地改善和推进我们对这些主题的理解。
