Newcastle University Medical School.
Institute of Biology, Leiden University.
Top Cogn Sci. 2020 Jul;12(3):828-842. doi: 10.1111/tops.12444. Epub 2019 Jul 29.
Human language is a salient example of a neurocognitive system that is specialized to process complex dependencies between sensory events distributed in time, yet how this system evolved and specialized remains unclear. Artificial Grammar Learning (AGL) studies have generated a wealth of insights into how human adults and infants process different types of sequencing dependencies of varying complexity. The AGL paradigm has also been adopted to examine the sequence processing abilities of nonhuman animals. We critically evaluate this growing literature in species ranging from mammals (primates and rats) to birds (pigeons, songbirds, and parrots) considering also cross-species comparisons. The findings are contrasted with seminal studies in human infants that motivated the work in nonhuman animals. This synopsis identifies advances in knowledge and where uncertainty remains regarding the various strategies that nonhuman animals can adopt for processing sequencing dependencies. The paucity of evidence in the few species studied to date and the need for follow-up experiments indicate that we do not yet understand the limits of animal sequence processing capacities and thereby the evolutionary pattern. This vibrant, yet still budding, field of research carries substantial promise for advancing knowledge on animal abilities, cognitive substrates, and language evolution.
人类语言是一个突出的神经认知系统的例子，专门用于处理时间上分布的复杂感官事件之间的依赖关系，但这个系统是如何进化和专门化的仍然不清楚。人工语法学习 (AGL) 研究为我们提供了大量关于人类成人和婴儿如何处理不同类型的、具有不同复杂程度的序列依赖关系的见解。AGL 范式也被用于研究非人类动物的序列处理能力。我们批判性地评估了从哺乳动物（灵长类动物和老鼠）到鸟类（鸽子、鸣禽和鹦鹉）等各种物种的这一不断增长的文献，同时也考虑了跨物种比较。研究结果与激发非人类动物研究的人类婴儿的开创性研究进行了对比。这篇综述确定了在处理序列依赖关系方面，非人类动物可以采用的各种策略的知识进步和仍然存在的不确定性。迄今为止，在少数几个研究过的物种中证据匮乏，需要进行后续实验，这表明我们还不了解动物序列处理能力的极限，从而也不了解进化模式。这个充满活力但仍处于萌芽阶段的研究领域，为推进关于动物能力、认知基础和语言进化的知识提供了巨大的希望。
