Toro Soto, Juan Manuel, 1976-Hoeschele, Marisa2021-07-092021-07-092017Toro JM, Hoeschele M. Generalizing prosodic patterns by a non-vocal learning mammal. Anim Cogn. 2017 Mar;20(2):179-85. DOI: 10.1007/s10071-016-1036-81435-9448http://hdl.handle.net/10230/48138Prosody, a salient aspect of speech that includes rhythm and intonation, has been shown to help infants acquire some aspects of syntax. Recent studies have shown that birds of two vocal learning species are able to categorize human speech stimuli based on prosody. In the current study, we found that the non-vocal learning rat could also discriminate human speech stimuli based on prosody. Not only that, but rats were able to generalize to novel stimuli they had not been trained with, which suggests that they had not simply memorized the properties of individual stimuli, but learned a prosodic rule. When tested with stimuli with either one or three out of the four prosodic cues removed, the rats did poorly, suggesting that all cues were necessary for the rats to solve the task. This result is in contrast to results with humans and budgerigars, both of which had previously been studied using the same paradigm. Humans and budgerigars both learned the task and generalized to novel items, but were also able to solve the task with some of the cues removed. In conclusion, rats appear to have some of the perceptual abilities necessary to generalize prosodic patterns, in a similar though not identical way to the vocal learning species that have been studied.application/pdfengThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-1036-8ProsodyRatsVocal learningOperant conditioninginfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess