Language discrimination by Java sparrows.
Java sparrows (Padda oryzivora) were trained to discriminate English from Chinese spoken by a bilingual speaker. They could learn discrimination and showed generalization to new sentences spoken by the same speaker and those spoken by a new speaker. Thus, the birds distinguished between English and Chinese. Although auditory cues for the discrimination were not specified, this is the first evidence that non-mammalian species can discriminate human languages.
Watanabe
Shigeru
S
Department of Psychology, Keio University, Mita 2-15-45, Minato-Ku, Tokyo, Japan. swat@flet.keio.ac.jp
Yamamoto
Erico
E
Uozumi
Midori
M
D000819:Animal Communication; D000818:Animals; D002681:China; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D046370:Sparrows; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013063:Speech Discrimination Tests