title: Perception of synthetic /ba/-/wa/ speech continuum by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus).
abstract: Other than humans, extensive vocal learning has only been widely demonstrated in birds. Moreover, there are only a handful of avian species that are known to be good mimics of human speech. One such species is the budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus), which is a popular mimic of human speech and learns new vocalizations throughout adult life. Using operant conditioning procedures with a repeating background task, we tested budgerigars on the discrimination of tokens from two synthetic /ba/-/wa/ speech continua that differed in syllable, but not transition, duration. Budgerigars showed a significant improvement in discrimination performance on both continua near the phonetic boundary for humans. Budgerigars also showed a shift in the location of the phonetic boundary with a change in syllable length, similar to what has been described for humans and other primates. These results on a nonmammalian species provide support for the operation of a general, nonphonetic, auditory process as one mechanism which can lead to the well-known stimulus-length effect in humans.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park 20742, USA.
authors.forename: M L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Dent
authors.forename: E F
authors.initials: EF
authors.lastname: Brittan-Powell
authors.forename: R J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Dooling
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pierce
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000818:Animals; D003216:Conditioning, Operant; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010311:Parrots / Q000502:physiology*; D013067:Speech Perception; D013071:Speech, Alaryngeal; D014828:Vocalization, Animal