Symbolic representation acquisition is the complex cognitive process consisting of learning to use a symbol to stand for something else. A variety of non-human animals can engage in symbolic representation learning. One particularly complex form of symbol representation is the associations between orthographic symbols and speech sounds, known as grapheme–phoneme correspondence. To date, there has been little evidence that animals can learn this form of symbolic representation. Here, we evaluated whether an Umbrella cockatoo (Cacatua alba) can learn letter-speech correspondence using English words. The bird-participant was trained with phonics instruction and then tested on pairs of index cards while the experimenter spoke the word. The words were unknown to the bird and the experimenter was blinded to the correct card position. The cockatoo’s accuracy (M = 71%) was statistically significant. Further, we found a strong correlation between the bird’s word-identification success and the number of overlapping letters between words, where the more overlapping letters between words, the more likely the cockatoo answered incorrectly. Our results strongly suggest that parrots may have the ability to learn grapheme–phoneme correspondences.

中文翻译：

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鹦鹉的字素对应学习

符号表征习得是一个复杂的认知过程，包括学习使用符号来代表其他事物。多种非人类动物可以进行符号表征学习。符号表示的一种特别复杂的形式是拼字符号和语音之间的关联，称为字素-音素对应。迄今为止，几乎没有证据表明动物可以学习这种形式的符号表示。在这里，我们评估了伞凤头鹦鹉（Cacatua alba）是否可以使用英语单词学习字母-语音对应关系。鸟类参与者接受了语音指令的训练，然后在实验者说出单词时在成对的索引卡上进行测试。这只鸟不知道这些词，实验者也看不到卡片的正确位置。凤头鹦鹉的准确率（M = 71%）具有统计显着性。此外，我们发现鸟类的单词识别成功与单词之间重叠字母的数量之间存在很强的相关性，单词之间重叠的字母越多，凤头鹦鹉回答错误的可能性就越大。我们的结果强烈表明鹦鹉可能具有学习字素对应的能力。