Animals perform much like humans in many psychoacoustic capacities. However, several tasks reveal striking differences between animals and humans. Animals are markedly inferior to humans in pure tone frequency discrimination. Animals are deficient in discriminating intensity and duration decrements. Animals are deficient in certain tasks involving octave generalization. On the other hand, parakeets perform better than humans in forward and backward masking tasks. The proposed research will compare humans, macaque monkeys and chinchillas in processing simple tones, musical tones, animal sounds, and speech sounds, with emphasis on those tasks for which animals have been shown to be markedly inferior (or superior) to humans. All species will be tested using the same stimuli, procedures, and threshold criteria. Both go, no-go discrimination and left/right identification procedures will be used. Monkeys and chinchillas will be trained with operant conditioning techniques and food reinforcement. The specific objective is to precisely define similarities and differences in human, non-human primate, and non-primate mammalian hearing, in order to determine which species are adequate models for human auditory capacities. The ultimate goal is to integrate existing psychoacoustic data from humans, monkeys, chinchillas and birds in order to more clearly delineate which aspects of human hearing are inherited from vertebrate, mammalian or primate ancestors, and which are species- specific to humans.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
8R01DC000541-02
Application #
3217092
Study Section
Hearing Research Study Section (HAR)
Project Start
1988-07-01
Project End
1991-06-30
Budget Start
1989-07-01
Budget End
1990-06-30
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
1989
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
University of South Alabama
Department
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
City
Mobile
State
AL
Country
United States
Zip Code
36688
Sinnott, Joan M; Gonzales, Christopher L; Masood, Ambrin F et al. (2007) Training humans in non-native phoneme perception using a monkey psychoacoustic procedure. J Acoust Soc Am 121:3846-57
Sinnott, Joan M; Powell, Laura A; Camchong, Jazmin (2006) Using monkeys to explore perceptual ""loss"" versus ""learning"" models in English and Spanish voice-onset-time perception. J Acoust Soc Am 119:1585-96
Sinnott, Joan M; Gilmore, Casey S (2004) Perception of place-of-articulation information in natural speech by monkeys versus humans. Percept Psychophys 66:1341-50
Sinnott, Joan M; Mosqueda, Susannah B (2003) Effects of aging on speech sound discrimination in the Mongolian gerbil. Ear Hear 24:30-7
Sinnott, J M; Saporita, T A (2000) Differences in American English, Spanish, and monkey perception of the say-stay trading relation. Percept Psychophys 62:1312-9
Sinnott, J M; Williamson, T L (1999) Can macaques perceive place of articulation from formant transition information? J Acoust Soc Am 106:929-37
Sinnott, J M; Brown, C H; Borneman, M A (1998) Effects of syllable duration on stop-glide identification in syllable-initial and syllable-final position by humans and monkeys. Percept Psychophys 60:1032-43
Sinnott, J M; Brown, C H (1997) Perception of the American English liquid /ra-la/ contrast by humans and monkeys. J Acoust Soc Am 102:588-602
Sinnott, J M; Brown, C H; Malik, W T et al. (1997) A multidimensional scaling analysis of vowel discrimination in humans and monkeys. Percept Psychophys 59:1214-24
Sinnott, J M; Brown, C H (1993) Effects of varying signal and noise levels on pure-tone frequency discrimination in humans and monkeys. J Acoust Soc Am 93:1535-40

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