Recent psychophysical experiments have shown that zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata-a songbird) are surprisingly insensitive to syllable sequence changes in their species-specific motifs while budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus-a psittacine) do much better when tested on exactly the same sounds. This is unexpected since zebra finch males learn the order of syllables in their songs when young and sing the same song throughout adulthood. Here we probe the limits of this species difference by testing birds on an order change involving just two syllables, hereafter called bi-syllable phrases. Results show budgerigars still perform better than zebra finches on an order change involving just two syllables. An analysis of response latencies shows that both species respond to an order change in a bi-syllable motif at the onset of the first syllable rather than listening to the entire sequence before responding. Additional tests with one syllable omitted or doubled, or with white noise bursts substituted for syllables, indicate that the first syllable in the sequence has a dominant effect on subsequent discrimination of changes in a bi-syllable pattern. These results are surprising in that zebra finch males sing their full motif syllable sequence with a high degree of stereotypy throughout life, suggesting that this consistency in production may not rely on perceptual mechanisms for processing syllable order in adulthood. Budgerigars, on the other hand, are quite sensitive to bi-syllable order changes, an ability that may be related to useful information being encoded in the sequence of syllables in their natural song. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

---

两种鸟类——Taeniopygia guttata 和 Melopsittacus undulatus 的声音顺序辨别。

最近的心理物理学实验表明，斑胸草雀 (Taeniopygia guttata - 一种鸣禽) 对其物种特异性基序的音节序列变化出奇地不敏感，而虎皮鹦鹉 (Melopsittacus undulatus - 一种鹦鹉) 在完全相同的声音下测试时表现要好得多。这是出乎意料的，因为雄性斑胸草雀在幼年时就学会了歌曲中的音节顺序，并在整个成年期唱同一首歌。在这里，我们通过测试鸟类对仅涉及两个音节的顺序变化（以下称为双音节短语）来探讨这种物种差异的极限。结果显示虎皮鹦鹉在仅涉及两个音节的顺序变化方面仍然比斑胸草雀表现更好。对响应延迟的分析表明，这两个物种在第一个音节开始时对双音节基序的顺序变化做出响应，而不是在响应之前听完整个序列。一个音节被省略或加倍的附加测试，或用白噪声突发代替音节，表明序列中的第一个音节对随后的双音节模式变化的辨别具有主导作用。这些结果令人惊讶，因为雄性斑胸草雀在整个生命过程中都以高度刻板的方式唱出它们完整的母题音节序列，这表明这种生产的一致性可能不依赖于成年后处理音节顺序的感知机制。另一方面，虎皮鹦鹉对双音节顺序变化非常敏感，一种可能与有用信息有关的能力，这些信息被编码在自然歌曲的音节序列中。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。