Abstract

TORO, Juan Manuel. Biological foundations in the extraction of regularities from speech. Suma Psicol. [online]. 2011, vol.18, n.1, pp.47-56. ISSN 0121-4381.

One of the major problems in the study of language is to understand its biological roots. An effective way to tackle this issue is to explore to which extent we share with other animals some of the mechanisms responsible for its processing. In this paper we present a series of experiments that demonstrate that the abilities required to extract rhythmic and statistical regularities from speech are already present in rodents. Other studies also suggest that some animals might be able to process certain abstract structures that have been traditionally linked to grammar. Together, these studies point towards the idea that many of the basic components of language processing are shared across different species. Nevertheless, there is still a wide array of linguistic phenomena that should be studied from a comparative perspective to determine the extent to which human language uses abilities found in other animals.

Keywords : speech perception; language evolution; rats; prosody; grammar.

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