Speech Perception by the Chinchilla: Voiced-Voiceless Distinction in Alveolar Plosive Consonants

Four chinchillas were trained to respond differently to /t/ and /d/ consonant-vowel syllables produced by four talkers in three vowel contexts. This training generalized to novel instances, including synthetically produced /da/ and /ta/ (voice-on-set times of 0 and +80 milliseconds, respectively). In a second experiment, synthetic stimuli with voice-onset times between 0 and +80 milliseconds were presented for identification. The form of the labeling functions and the "phonetic boundaries" for chinchillas and English-speaking adults were similar.