Speech perception by the chinchilla: voiced-voiceless distinction in alveolar plosive consonants.
Four chinchillas were trained to respond differently to /t/ and /d/ consonant-vowel syllables produced by four talkers in three vowel contexts. This training generalized to novel instances, including synthetically produced /da/ and /ta/ (voice-on-set times of 0 and +80 milliseconds, respectively). In a second experiment, synthetic stimuli with voice-onset times between 0 and +80 milliseconds were presented for identification. The form of the labeling functions and the "phonetic boundaries" for chinchillas and English-speaking adults were similar.
D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D002682:Chinchilla / Q000502:physiology*; D003213:Conditioning, Psychological; D007802:Language; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech