DIFFERENCES IN HUMAN AND MONKEY SENSITIVITY TO ACOUSTIC CUES UNDERLYING VOICING CONTRASTS

Humans and monkeys were compared in their differential sensitivity to various acoustic cues underlying voicing contrasts specified by voice-onset time (VOT) in utterance-initial stop consonants. A low-uncertainty repeating standard AX procedure and positive-reinforcement operant conditioning techniques were used to measure difference limens (DLs) along a VOT continuum from -70 ms (prevoiced /ba/) to 0 ms (/ba/) to +70 ms (/pa/). For all contrasts tested, human sensitivity was more acute than that of monkeys. For voicing lag, which spans a phonemic contrast in English, human DLs for a /ba/(standard)-to-/pa/ (target) continuum averaged 8.3 ms compared to 17 ms for monkeys. Human DLs for a /pa/-to-/ba/ continuum averaged 11 ms compared to 25 ms for monkeys. Larger species differences occurred for voicing lead, which is phonemically nondistinctive in English. Human DLs for a /ba/-to-prevoiced/ba/ continuum averaged 8.2 ms and were four times lower than monkeys (35 ms). Monkeys did not reliably discriminate prevoiced /ba/-to-/ba/, whereas humans DLs averaged 18 ms. The effects of eliminating cues in the English VOT contrasts were also examined. Removal of the aspiration noise in /pa/ greatly increased the DLs and reaction times for both humans and monkeys, but straightening out the F1 transition in /ba/ had only minor effects. Results suggest that quantitative differences in sensitivity should be considered when using monkeys to model the psychoacoustic level of human speech perception. © 1987 Acoustical Society of America.