Phylogeny and ontogeny of vowel perception

在这个项目中，研究人员研究了人类婴儿、黑猩猩和日本猴子对元音的感知。元音，例如[a]，由不同的说话者发出时，具有不同的声学特性。例如，女性和儿童元音的基本频率和形成峰频率比男性高。然而，人类可以将这些语音理解为相同的元音。这种现象被称为声道归一化，被认为是语音感知的一个重要方面，也是人类语言的先决条件之一。人类听者似乎会参照一个很好的例子或原型来表示语言类别。有研究认为，成人和婴儿对言语类别的原型表现出一种“知觉磁体效应”。本课题研究声道归一化和磁体效应。为了研究声道规范化的能力，本文引入了女性和男性发音的日语合成元音。合成了[o]-[A]连续体，并检查了这两个元音之间边界的移动。研究对象包括成人、3-5岁的学龄前婴儿、5-7个月大的婴儿、黑猩猩和日本猴子。以菲律宾婴儿为研究对象，以猿猴为研究对象。成人和学龄前儿童、黑猩猩和日本猴子表现出声道正常化的能力。5个人类婴儿中有3个表现出声道正常化的能力。有必要增加受试者并改进最近从库尔博士那里学到的转头技术。为了研究磁体效应，合成了[u]-[i]连续体。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]显示磁体效应。通过反应时间任务研究其效果。结果表明，黑猩猩具有[u]的原型，但不具有[i]的原型。瑞典语在[i]和[u]之间有元音[y]，这在英语中是没有的。研究瑞典婴儿何时获得[y]原型是很有趣的。库尔博士展示了它们6个月大时的原型。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