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，女性和儿童元音的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，被认为是言语感知的一个重要方面，也是人类说话的先决条件之一。人类听者似乎参照一个好的实例或该类别的原型来表示语音类别。有人认为，人类成人和婴儿对言语范畴的原型表现出“知觉磁铁效应”。在本课题中，我们研究了声道归一化和磁体效应。为了研究声道归一化的能力，用两个Fe-…发音的人工合成的日语元音更多的男性和男性演讲者被介绍进来。合成了一个[o]-[a]连续体，并考察了这两个元音之间边界的移动。实验对象为成人、3~5岁学龄前婴儿、5~7月龄婴儿、黑猩猩和日本猴。对菲尼安婴儿进行了转头检查，并对猿和猴子进行了反应时测试。人类成人和学龄前儿童、黑猩猩和日本猴表现出声道正常化的能力。5个人类婴儿中有3个显示出声道正常化能力。为了研究磁体效应，我们合成了一个[u]-[i]连续体。虽然黑猩猩有听起来像[u]的元音，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。通过反应时任务考察了其影响。结果表明，黑猩猩有[u]的原型，但没有[i]的原型。瑞典语的元音[y]介于[i]和[u]之间，这不是英语中的元音。研究瑞典婴儿何时获得[y]的原型是有意义的。库尔博士表明，它们在6个月大的时候就有了原型[y]。较少

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