Brief article Segmentation of the speech stream in a non- human primate: statistical learning in cotton-top tamarins Marc D. Hauser a, * , Elissa L. Newport b , Richard N. Aslin b a Department of Psychology and Program in Neurosciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA b Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Meliora Hall ± River Campus, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA Received 13 May 2000; accepted 4 October 2000 Abstract Previous work has shown that human adults, children, and infants can rapidly compute sequential statistics from a stream of speech and then use these statistics to determine which syllable sequences form potential words. In the present paper we ask whether this ability re¯ects a mechanism unique to humans, or might be used by other species as well, to acquire serially organized patterns. In a series of four experimental conditions, we exposed a New World monkey, the cotton-top tamarin (Saguinus oedipus), to the same speech streams used by Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (Science 274 (1996) 1926) with human infants, and then tested their learning using similar methods to those used with infants. Like humans, tamarins showed clear evidence of discriminating between sequences of syllables that differed only in the frequency or probability with which they occurred in the input streams. These results suggest that both humans and non-human primates possess mechanisms capable of computing these particular aspects of serial order. Future work must now show where humans' (adults and infants) and non-human primates' abilities in these tasks diverge. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Learning; Speech perception; Serial order; Non-human primates M.D. Hauser et al. / Cognition 78 (2001) B53±B64 B53 Cognition 78 (2001) B53±B64 www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit 0010-0277/01/$ - see front matter q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0010-0277(00)00132-3 COGNITION * Corresponding author. Fax: 11-617-496-7077. E-mail addresses: hauser@wjh.harvard.edu (M.D. Hauser), newport@bcs.rochester.edu (E.L. Newport), aslin@cvs.rochester.edu (R.N. Aslin).