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Science 14 April 2000:
Vol. 288. no. 5464, pp. 349 - 351
DOI: 10.1126/science.288.5464.349
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Reports

Language Discrimination by Human Newborns and by Cotton-Top Tamarin Monkeys

Franck Ramus, 1*dagger Marc D. Hauser, 2 Cory Miller, 2 Dylan Morris, 2 Jacques Mehler 1

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.

1 Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 54 Boulevard Raspail, 75006 Paris, France.
2 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
*   To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: f.ramus{at}ucl.ac.uk

dagger    Present address: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)