Abstract
Two budgerigars were trained to respond differently to two synthetic speech tokens, /da/ and /ta/. Voice onset times (VOTs) of these synthetic stimuli were 0 and +70 msec, respectively. After reaching criterion level performance on these stimuli, the budgerigars were tested with synthetic stimuli having VOTs between 0 and 4–70 msec. The categorization functions derived from each bird’s responses to these intermediate stimuli were similar in shape but differed in their boundary locations from the functions typically obtained from humans and other mammals. In addition, the birds found this speech discrimination task extraordinarily difficult. These results define some of the limitations of the budgerigar’s auditory system for the processing of complex acoustic stimuli. Since the budgerigar has a distinctly nonmammalian auditory system, these results also have relevance for current theories of speech perception.
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These experiments were supported by Public Health Service Grant NS-19006 and Research Career Development Award HD-00512 to R. Dooling. We thank Kevin Reed and Brian Dooling for care of the birds and Cathy Biro for the conduct of important pilot experiments. Sigfrid Soli is now at the Biosciences Laboratory, 270-4S-11, 3-M Center, St. Paul, MN 55144.
An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/BF03330334.
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Dooling, R.J., Soli, S.D., Kline, R.M. et al. Perception of synthetic speech sounds by the budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus). Bull. Psychon. Soc. 25, 139–142 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330308
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330308