Neural evidence that dogs segment the speech they hear with a humanlike consonant bias

During speech segmentation, humans, unlike non-human primates, rely more on consonant than vowel patterns, despite vowels’ greater acoustic saliency. To investigate whether this consonant bias is human-unique or could also emerge in other species exposed to human speech we performed non-invasive EEG in humans and dogs.

Inter-trial coherence measures of neural entrainment and event-related potentials revealed enhanced word-level tracking for consonant- as compared to vowel-structured streams in both species. This suggests that dogs, like humans, exhibit consonant bias when segmenting the speech they hear. Linguistic regularity-based processing biases can thus also emerge in a non-speaking species exposed to speech.</p>