title: Zebra finches are sensitive to prosodic features of human speech.
abstract: Variation in pitch, amplitude and rhythm adds crucial paralinguistic information to human speech. Such prosodic cues can reveal information about the meaning or emphasis of a sentence or the emotional state of the speaker. To examine the hypothesis that sensitivity to prosodic cues is language independent and not human specific, we tested prosody perception in a controlled experiment with zebra finches. Using a go/no-go procedure, subjects were trained to discriminate between speech syllables arranged in XYXY patterns with prosodic stress on the first syllable and XXYY patterns with prosodic stress on the final syllable. To systematically determine the salience of the various prosodic cues (pitch, duration and amplitude) to the zebra finches, they were subjected to five tests with different combinations of these cues. The zebra finches generalized the prosodic pattern to sequences that consisted of new syllables and used prosodic features over structural ones to discriminate between stimuli. This strong sensitivity to the prosodic pattern was maintained when only a single prosodic cue was available. The change in pitch was treated as more salient than changes in the other prosodic features. These results show that zebra finches are sensitive to the same prosodic cues known to affect human speech perception.
authors.affiliation: Behavioural Biology, Institute Biology Leiden (IBL), Leiden University, PO Box 9505, Leiden 2300 RA, The Netherlands Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC), Leiden University, PO Box 9600, Leiden 2300 RC, The Netherlands m.j.spierings.2@biology.leidenuniv.nl.
authors.forename: Michelle J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Spierings
authors.affiliation: Behavioural Biology, Institute Biology Leiden (IBL), Leiden University, PO Box 9505, Leiden 2300 RA, The Netherlands Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC), Leiden University, PO Box 9600, Leiden 2300 RC, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Carel
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: ten Cate
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003463:Cues; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D046369:Finches / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D013060:Speech
keywords: prosody; songbirds; speech; vocal perception; zebra finches