Phylogeny and ontogeny of vowel perception

在这个项目中，研究了人类婴儿、黑猩猩和日本猴子对元音的感知。元音，例如[a]，当由不同的说话者发音时，具有不同的声学特性。例如，女性和儿童的元音基频和共振峰频率高于男性。然而，人类可以将这些语音感知为相同的元音。这种现象被称为声道正常化，并被认为是语音感知的一个重要方面，也是人类语音的先决条件之一。人类听众似乎代表一个很好的实例或原型的类别的语音类别。有人认为，人类成年人和人类婴儿表现出“知觉磁铁效应”的言语类别的原型。本课题主要研究声道标准化和磁体效应，通过合成日语元音，研究声道标准化能力，并对两种发音方式的元音进行比较， 关于我们 介绍了男性和男性发言人。合成了一个[o]-[a]连续统，并检查了这两个元音之间的边界移动。成年人、3-5岁的学龄前婴儿、5-7月龄的人类婴儿、黑猩猩和日本猴作为受试者。菲律宾婴儿进行了研究的头部转向程序和猿和猴子进行了检查的反应时间任务。成年人和学龄前儿童、黑猩猩和日本猴都表现出声道正常化的能力。5名人类婴儿中有3名显示出声道正常化的能力。为了研究磁效应，我们合成了一个[u]-[i]连续谱。虽然黑猩猩有类似元音的声音，听起来像[u]，但它们没有[i]。换句话说，他们没有原型[i]。因此，它们可能只对[u]显示磁铁效应。通过反应时任务研究了这种效应。结果表明，黑猩猩有原型[u]，但没有原型[i]。瑞典语中[i]和[u]之间有元音[y]，这在英语中不是。研究瑞典婴儿何时获得[y]的原型是很有趣的。Kuhl博士表明，它们在6个月大时就有了原型[y]。少

In this project the perception of vowels were studied in human babies, chimpanzees and Japanese monkeys. Vowels, for example[a], when pronounced by different speakers, have different acoustic properties. For example, the fundamental frequency and formant frequencies of vowels are higher in females and children than in males. However, humans can perceive these speech sounds as the same vowel. This phenomenon has been called vocal tract normalization and has been considered to be an important aspect of speech perception and one of the prerequisites for human speech. Human listeners appear to represent speech categories with reference to a good instance or prototype of the category. It has been suggested that human adults and human infants exhibit a "perceptual magnet effect" for the prototype of speech categories. In this project, vocal tract normalization and the magnet effect were studied.To Study the ability of vocal tract normalization, synthetic Japanese vowels pronounced by both fe … More male and male speakers were introduced. A[o]-[a]continuum was synthesized and the shift of the boundary between these two vowels were examined. Human adults, preschool infants of 3-5 years of age, human babies of 5-7 months of age, chimpanzees and Japanese monkeys were served as subjects. FiLinian babies were studied by the head-turn procedure and apes and monkeys were examined by the reaction time task. Human adults and preschool children, chimpanzees and Japanese monkeys showed the ability of vocal tract normalization. Three of the 5 human babies showed the ability of vocal tract normalization. It is necessary to increase subjects and to improve the head-turn technique which was recently learned from Dr. Kuhl.To study the magnet effect, a [u]-[i]continuum was synthesized. Although chimpanzees have the vowel-like sound which heard as [u], they do not have [i]. In other words, they do not have the prototypic [i]. Thus, they may show the magnet effect only for [u]. The effect was studied by the reaction time task. The results showed that chimpanzees have the prototypic [u], but do not have the prototype of [i]. Swedish have the vowel [y] between [i] and [u], which is not in English. It is of interest to examine when Swedish babies acquire prototype of [y]. Dr. Kuhl showed that they have the prototypic [y] at 6 months of age. Less