Journal
SCIENCE
Volume 288, Issue 5464, Pages 349-351Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.288.5464.349
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- NCRR NIH HHS [P51RR00168-37] Funding Source: Medline
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Humans, but no other animal, make meaningful use of spoken Language. What is unclear, however, is whether this capacity depends on a unique constellation of perceptual and neurobiological mechanisms or whether a subset of such mechanisms is shared with other organisms, To explore this problem, parallel experiments were conducted on human newborns and cotton-top tamarin monkeys to assess their ability to discriminate unfamiliar Languages. A habituation-dishabituation procedure was used to show that human newborns and tamarins can discriminate sentences from Dutch and Japanese but not if the sentences are played backward. Moreover, the cues for discrimination are not present in backward speech. This suggests that the human newborns' tuning to certain properties of speech relies on general processes of the primate auditory system.
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