The long-term objective is to investigate to what extent "special" versus "general" processing mechanisms contribute to human speech perception. Thespecific aims are to study the perception of trading relations in Englishphonology by humans and monkeys. A trading relation is one in whichmultiple, and seemingly unrelated, acoustic cues contribute to the samephonetic percept. Trading relations are studied by synthesizing bothnormal and altered speech sound continua in which the value of oneacoustic cue is reduced. Listeners perceive a shift in the identifiedphoneme boundary to compensate for the reduced cue. Both general mammalianauditory and human-specific, articulation-mediated processes have beenproposed to account for trading relations. The comparativeapproach is apowerful tool to help distinguish between these two alternatives. Wepropose to train two different monkey species to identify speech soundsusing both gono-go and go-leftgo-right procedures in order to test theirsensitivity to trading relations. Monkeys will be trained with operantconditioning techniques and positive food reinforcement. Two humansubject populations consisting of both native American and non-nativeHispanic speakers of English will be tested with the same basicprocedures. Comparisons between these subject groups will help to clarifyif trading relations are native- language-specific, human-specific, orreflect general processing strategies of the primate auditory system. Results will be related to a theoretical framework put forth bydevelopmental psycho-linguists that distinguishes between "maintenance", "facilitation" and "induction" as different processes by which linguisticexperience affects speech perception.
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Cercopithecidae, Cue, Experience, Hispanic American, Human Subject, Language, Macaca, Neural Information Processing, Psycholinguistics, Speech Recognition, Voice
