Abstract
Recent research with cotton-top tamarin monkeys has revealed language discrimination abilities similar to those found in human infants, demonstrating that these perceptual abilities are not unique to humans but are also present in non-human primates. Specifically, tamarins could discriminate forward but not backward sentences of Dutch from Japanese, using both natural and synthesized utterances. The present study was designed as a conceptual replication of the work on tamarins. Results show that rats trained in a discrimination learning task readily discriminate forward, but not backward sentences of Dutch from Japanese; the results are particularly robust for synthetic utterances, a pattern that shows greater parallels with newborns than with tamarins. Our results extend the claims made in the research with tamarins that the capacity to discriminate languages from different rhythmic classes depends on general perceptual abilities that evolved at least as far back as the rodents.
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Notes
The discrimination ratio was calculated by dividing the mean frequency of lever-pressing in the 1st minute (A) of the 2-min interval after each sentence by the mean responses in A plus mean responses in the 2nd min of this interval (C). This operation gives values between 1 and 0. Values tending to 1 indicate a higher mean response in A than in C; values tending to 0 indicate a higher mean response in C than in A (see Tarpy 2000; Toro et al. 2003).
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Acknowledgements
The research reported here was supported by a grant from the James S. McDonnell Foundation JSMF-20002079, the Catalan Government Research Grant SGR00034, and Fellowship AP2000-4164 from the Spanish MECD to the first author. The procedure was approved by the CEEA (Comité de Etica en Experimentación Animal) from the University of Barcelona and complied with the guidelines of the Catalan and Spanish governments about treatment of laboratory animals. We are indebted to Dr. Frank Ramus and Dr. Marc Hauser for kindly supplying the stimuli used in this study. We would like to thank Dr. Laura Bosch and Dr. Albert Costa for comments on an earlier draft of this article.
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Toro, J.M., Trobalon, J.B. & Sebastián-Gallés, N. The use of prosodic cues in language discrimination tasks by rats. Anim Cogn 6, 131–136 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-003-0172-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-003-0172-0