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Biomedical subjects

T G Bever

Publications and source records attributed to T G Bever.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1992

Canonical and non-canonical syllable discrimination by two-day-old infants.

Canonical syllables may be important units in early speech perception as well as production. Twenty infants (mean age 51 hours) (and twenty controls) were tested for their ability to discriminate between members of syllable pairs which were either canonical (paet and taep) or non-canonical (pst and tsp). A discrimination learning method was used in which syllables signalled the availability of either a recording of the mother's voice or silence--one of which was presented if the infant began a sucking burst. Infants in the canonical condition changed sucking patterns during signals over an 18-minute experimental session and activated their mother's voice more than silence, consistent with previous experiments using mother's voice as a reinforcer. In the non-canonical condition, infants also changed sucking patterns but sucked more during the signal for quiet than mother's voice, contrary to previous findings. Differential sucking during the syllables indicated discrimination in both conditions, but infants responded differently depending upon whether the syllables were canonical or non-canonical. The activation of silence in the non-canonical condition may be the result of a preference for quiet, but it is better explained as a failure to progress to a level of differential responding that was reached by the canonical group.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1991

On-line choice and the representation of serially structured stimuli.

Three groups of pigeons were trained to discriminate between a target temporal sequence, consisting of red, green, and blue, and distractor sequences consisting of all other combinations of these three colors presented on a pecking key. Response alternatives were provided during the course of the trial (on-line decisions) as well as the end of the trial (postsequence decisions). Different temporal phrasing patterns emphasized the first stimulus in the sequence, the final stimulus, or all stimuli equally. The phrasing pattern did not affect the speed of acquisition, but groups receiving emphasized stimuli relied more heavily on those stimuli than on the other stimuli for their discriminations. The patterns of both on-line choices during the sequence and terminal choices following the sequence were consistent with the use of hierarchical representations and inconsistent with a simple item-by-item prospective discrimination scheme.

Animals↗
PubMed1979

Can an ape create a sentence?

More than 19,000 multisign utterances of an infant chimpanzee (Nim) were analyzed for syntactic and semantic regularities. Lexical regularities were observed in the case of two-sign combinations: particular signs (for example, more) tended to occur in a particular position. These regularities could not be attributed to memorization or to position habits, suggesting that they were structurally constrained. That conclusion, however, was invalidated by videotape analyses, which showed that most of Nim's utterances were prompted by his teacher's prior utterance, and that Nim interrupted his teachers to a much larger extent than a child interrupts an adult's speech. Signed utterances of other apes (as shown on films) revealed similar non-human patterns of discourse.

Animal Communication↗
PubMed1979

Serial learning in the pigeon.

Three pigeons learned to peck four colors in a particular sequence, regardless of how these colors were positioned on four response keys and without feedback following each response. This demonstrates that serial learning is possible in subprimate animals.

Animals↗
PubMed1976

Segmentation in cinema perception.

Viewers perceptually segment moving picture sequences into their cinematically defined units: excerpts that follow short film sequences are recognized faster when the excerpt originally came after a structural cinematic break (a cut or change in the action) than when it originally came before the break.

Humans↗
PubMed1975

Detection of a nonlinguistic stimulus is poorest at the end of a clause.

Subjects detected a brief near-threshold tone while encoding two-clause sentences for later report. The objective tone locations were at the end of the first clause, at the beginning of the second clause, or in the clause boundary. The effects of intensity variations of the speech signal were assessed by having subjects detect the tones in the same speech stimuli played backward. Tones at the end of a clause are relatively harder to detect than in other positions, comparing forward and backward speech. This supports the view that listeners are preoccupied with internal processes at the end of a clause.

Acoustic Stimulation↗