Language discrimination by human newborns and by cotton-top tamarin monkeys
Language discrimination by human newborns and by cotton-top tamarin monkeys
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DOI：
10.1126/science.288.5464.349
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发表时间：
2000-04-14
期刊：
影响因子：
56.9
通讯作者：
Mehler, J
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ramus, F;Hauser, MD;Mehler, J
人类，而不是其他动物，有意义地使用口语。然而，目前尚不清楚的是，这种能力是否取决于一个独特的感知和神经生物学机制的星座，或者是否与其他生物共享这种机制的子集，为了探索这个问题，对人类新生儿和棉顶绢毛猴进行了平行实验，以评估他们区分不熟悉语言的能力。一个习惯化disabituation程序被用来表明，人类新生儿和绢毛猴可以区分句子从荷兰语和日语，但如果句子是向后播放。此外，辨别的线索并不存在于反向言语中。这表明，人类新生儿对某些语音特性的调整依赖于灵长类听觉系统的一般过程。
Humans, but no other animal, make meaningful use of spoken Language. What is unclear, however, is whether this capacity depends on a unique constellation of perceptual and neurobiological mechanisms or whether a subset of such mechanisms is shared with other organisms, To explore this problem, parallel experiments were conducted on human newborns and cotton-top tamarin monkeys to assess their ability to discriminate unfamiliar Languages. A habituation-dishabituation procedure was used to show that human newborns and tamarins can discriminate sentences from Dutch and Japanese but not if the sentences are played backward. Moreover, the cues for discrimination are not present in backward speech. This suggests that the human newborns' tuning to certain properties of speech relies on general processes of the primate auditory system.