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For many centuries "rMias been the conventional wisdom that 'language' is one of the essential features that differentiates humans from other primates. However, the past quarter-century has witnessed an explosion in our understanding of the linguistic, psychological, physiological, and developmental aspects of language, and with these advances the uniqueness of language among Homo sapiens has frequently been called into question. Certainly, the recent work on sign-language acquisition in chimpanzees has contributed substantially to this debate. Nevertheless, one aspect of language that most investigators seem willing to agree does differentiate humans and other primates is the ability to produce the human speech sounds that are the primary vehicles of meaning in our communication system. Not only are other primates unable to learn to produce most of the sounds of human speech [e.g., Hayes, 1951], but they lack the supralaryngeal vocal tracts capable of producing the range of human consonants and vowels [e.g., Lieberman, 1975; Lieberman et al., 1969]. Thus, human speech seems firmly established as one aspect of language that is indeed species-specific to H. sapiens. If the ability to produce human speech is unique to humans, does this mean that the perception of speech sounds is also unique to H. sapiens'} Although a unique relationship between production and perception of species-specific vocalizations has been documented in some species [e.g., Frishkopf et al., 1968], this may not be the case for human speech perception. The present series of papers grew out of a symposium at the Midwest Regional Meetings of the Animal Behavior Society in November, 1976, which began by addressing this very question. 1 The symposium was held November 12–14, 1976, at the Univ. of Illinois-Chicago Circle. We are deeply grateful to G. Berkson of the Illinois Inst, for DevelIntroduction 326