Segmentation of the speech stream in a non-human primate: statistical learning in cotton-top tamarins

Previous work has shown that human adults, children, and infants can rapidl y compute sequential statistics from a stream of speech and then use these statistics to determine which syllable sequences form potential words. in t he present paper we ask whether this ability reflects a mechanism unique to humans, or might be used by other species as well, to acquire serially org anized patterns. In a series of four experimental conditions, we exposed a New World monkey, the cotton-top tamarin (Saguinus oedipus), to the same sp eech streams used by Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (Science 274 (1996) 1926) with human infants, and then tested their learning using similar methods to those used with infants. Like humans, tamarins showed clear evidence of di scriminating between sequences of syllables that differed only in the frequ ency or probability with which they occurred in the input streams. These re sults suggest that both humans and non-human primates possess mechanisms ca pable of computing these particular aspects of serial order. Future work mu st now show where humans' (adults and infants) and non-human primates' abil ities in these tasks diverge. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights res erved.