How do chinchillas, pigeons, and infants perceive speech? Another Comment on Skipper et al.

This study failed to replicate the effect on accuracy of speech perception found with discrimination or identification tasks but did find an RT effect that held for some sounds and not others. See my detailed comments on this studyhere.But back to SDL and chinchillas. What is their take on these facts? Here's what they say:Though these categorical speech perception studies are often revered because they suggest the reality of speech units like phonemes, they have been criticized. Problems include that the tasks assume the units under study and that within category differences are actually readily discernible and meaningfulI agree with both the idea that these studies don't necessarily imply that the phoneme (or segment) is a unit of analysis in perception or that listeners can't hear within category differences (see Massaro's critiques of categorical perception). But that doesn't make the similarity between the human and chinchilla curve evaporate. No matter what unit is being analyzed or whether within-category differences can be detected under other task conditions, it still remains that chinchilla's can hear subtle differences between speech sounds. SDL's critique is tangential.SDL then turn to a line of argumentation that makes no sense to me. The write of the claim from animal work thatNeurobiologically, the argument is unsound because, in the early work frequently used to support this argument... the brain was not directly observe...
Source: Talking Brains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Source Type: blogs