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Speech perception by budgerigars ( Melopsittacus undulatus ): Spoken vowels

1988; Acoustical Society of America; Volume: 83; Issue: S1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1121/1.2025392

1520-9024

Susan Brown, Robert J. Dooling, Kazuo Okanoya,

Marine animal studies overview

Budgerigars (parakeets) were trained on a same/different task using operant conditioning. Response latencies were used to construct similarity matrices, and multidimensional scaling procedures were then used to produce spatial maps of these speech stimuli. Budgerigars were tested on stimulus sets consisting of natural exemplars of different vowels produced by a number of male and female talkers. In spite of variation among talkers, budgerigars showed evidence of perceptual categories for different vowels as well as for male and female talkers. The two-dimensional perceptual space for budgerigars discriminating among vowels bears a striking resemblance to the familiar F1-F2 vowel space described by Peterson and Barney [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 24, 175–184 (1952)]. This suggests that budgerigars use first and second formant information in discriminating among spoken, sustained vowels. [Work supported by NIH.]