Perception of synthetic /ba/–/wa/ speech continuum by budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus)

Other than humans, extensive vocal learning has only been widely demonstrated in birds. Moreover, there are only a handful of avian species that are known to be good mimics of human speech. One such species is the budgerigar (Melopsittacus undulatus), which is a popular mimic of human speech and learns new vocalizations throughout adult life. Using operant conditioning procedures with a repeating background task, we tested budgerigars on the discrimination of tokens from two synthetic /ba/-/wa/ speech continua that differed in syllable, but not transition, duration. Budgerigars showed a significant improvement in discrimination performance on both continua near the phonetic boundary for humans. Budgerigars also showed a shift in the location of the phonetic boundary with a change in syllable length, similar to what has been described for humans and other primates. These results on a nonmammalian species provide support for the operation of a general, nonphonetic, auditory process as one mechanism which can lead to the well-known stimulus-length effect in humans.