ABSTRACT

The literature on animal “phoneme boundaries” is reviewed. Studies are reviewed using monkeys, chinchillas, budgerigars and quail as subjects on both discrimination and identification procedures. A total of 28 comparative boundary experiments are reviewed, examining labial, alveolar, and velar voice-onset-time, place-of-articulation, liquid, and stop-glide contrasts. In approximately 18 of these cases, animal boundaries corresponded with those of English listeners; for the remaining 10, they did not. In some cases, hypotheses can be offered as to why the animal boundaries did, or did not, correspond with those of English listeners, but in other cases, the lack of human control data make it difficult to formulate precise hypotheses. Obviously more data from different kinds of phoneme contrasts would be very useful to have, particularly non-English ones, together with experimental designs that allow the comparison of human and animal subjects using the same stimuli and procedures. Such experiments would be useful to determine areas of enhanced sensitivity along speech continua that are inherited from general vertebrate, mammalian, or primate ancestors, as opposed to those that are acquired by exposure to specific human languages.