de la Mora, D. & Toro, J. M.
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Recent research suggests that structural generalizations seem to be preferentially performed over vowels, but not over consonants. Nevertheless, the source of these functional differences between consonants and vowels is unknown. One possibility is that participants transfer the acoustic differences between consonants and vowels to functional differences. If so, we could expect to find similar results in nonhuman animals. Our aim was to study rats’ capacity to generalize rules implemented over vowels and consonants. In Experiment 1, rats were trained to discriminate CVCVCV nonsense words in which vowels followed an AAB structure in half of the words and an ABC structure in the other half, whereas consonants were combined randomly. In Experiment 2, rules were implemented over the consonants and vowels varied at random. In the test phase of both experiments eight new test words were presented. Following the presentation of each AAB or ABC word lever-pressing responses were registered and food was delivered. We found that rats could generalize to new tokens rule-like structures over both vowels and consonants. Our results support the hypothesis that acoustic differences between consonants and vowels, per se, are insufficient to trigger differences over which units are preferentially used for rule learning.