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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*
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
Present address: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience,
17 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AR, UK.
Read the Full Text
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