LangSci Lunch Talk: Adam Fishbein (NACS)

Food and ideas bring people together.  Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.

Lunch is served starting at 12:15pm.

Auditory Pattern Processing in Budgerigars

Pattern processing underlies both human language and avian song perception. Comparative work shows that budgerigars, a small species of parrots, have greater sensitivity to sequential order in sound patterns than songbirds like zebra finches and canaries. Here I present pilot experiments investigating the limits of auditory pattern processing in budgies, testing abstract rule learning and discrimination of patterns ranging from simple tone sequences to a context-free artificial grammar that follows the Fibonacci series. These experiments suggest what kinds of rules budgies are able to use in discriminating auditory sequences, and how their abilities differ from those of humans.