Hi all,
I wanted to leave a link to an excellent article which discussed how studies of non-human animal perception contribute to our theories of human perception: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~lholt/publications/KluenderLottoHolt2005.pdf
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In the article it says that humans create 800 speech sounds across all languages and that 58 phonetic attributes are required to describe all these sounds. But each individual person doesn't make each of those sounds, or at least isn't aware of it if they do, and most of the time can't contrast between sounds in other languages very well.
So how can we say that certain primates top out at producing 35 sounds if we're not trained at receiving that kind of input? Our brains aren't mapped out to discriminate between subtle differences that may occur in those types of sounds, so how do researchers decide these phonetic category boundaries?
Courtney, that's a great question! One nice example is that of bats, who make most sounds at frequencies that are impossible for humans to perceive (we perceive up to 20 kHz, while bats can produce sounds with frequencies as high as 120 kHz!)
So researchers can't rely on their own ears to judge how many different sounds there are in other languages, or in other species. Instead, we record them and analyze them with software that can accurately represent these sounds, which are hard to discriminate or just plain impossible.
I got curious about this and found an interesting article on an online magazine, about how complex bats' songs are:
http://www.physorg.com/news111926646.html
I guess that's easier to study than whales, right?!
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