Dogs also rely on consonants to distinguish words in speech: exposure to language affects how the brain functions.
We really need a brain hyper-specialized in language like ours to analyze speech sounds in the human way? Maybe not, as suggested by a study on dogs, faithful guardians of our speech: Fido, like us, breaks down the sound flow of spoken language into words by relying on consonants rather than vowels.
According to the authors of the discovery, published in the journal Scienceis proof that to have efficient language processing you just need to be regularly exposed to spoken sounds: you don’t necessarily need to have a brain that is hyper-competent in verbal communication.
To learn and recognize consonants are better
When we are exposed to a continuous stream of words, we rely more on consonants, rather than vowels, to derive key lexical information (for example to understand where a word begins and where it ends). That is, consonants provide the main information – the framework – on the meaning of words, because they have, in many languages, a greater informative power.
For these reasons, around 12 months of life, the human brain begins to break up speech and memorize words by clinging more to consonants: it is called consonant bias and for some time we have wondered whether it is typical of the human brain due to the crucial role that language has had and has for our species.
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Scientists at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Budapest, Hungary, hypothesized that if the preference for consonants depended on human linguistic abilities, then no other species – not even dogs, which spend most of their lives immersed in our speech – should show the same imbalance for these types of sounds.
But if simpler forms of learning were sufficient, such as simple repeated exposure to language, then the consonant bias should also be observed in the brains of dogs, which we know, for example, are already capable of extracting meaningful words from speech. An experiment led us to lean towards this second path.
A common preference
The authors of the study subjected 20 adult humans and 20 dogs to EEG (electroencephalogram: a test that records and analyzes the electrical activity of the brain) while listening to streams of words not divided by pauses.
In the first type of listening, words with recurring consonant patterns were proposed, in which the vowels varied, but the consonants constituted the supporting skeleton of the speech; in a second typology, it was the vowels that played this leading role; in the third there were no recurring patterns, vowels and consonants alternated in syllables that did not form meaningful words.
Dog brains, like human brains, have been shown to rely more on consonants to distinguish word boundaries. In fact, he followed the rhythm of the words more easily when the consonants constituted the supporting framework. “This is the first evidence that a predisposition for consonants can also emerge in the brain of a species other than humans,” says Kinga G. Tóth, co-author of the study. The tendency to favor consonants was observed both on dogs exposed to language at an early stage and on those exposed at a more advanced stage.
“Regular exposure to spoken language could be sufficient to modify the functioning of the brain and give rise to processing characteristics previously observed only in humans, even in a species evolutionarily distant from us” clarifies cognitive neuroscientist Attila Andics, one of the authors of the study.
This similarity found in the canine brain could depend both on the proximity of these animals to humans (for example from the history of domestication of dogs) and on previous cognitive and auditory abilities, which do not depend on the interaction between dogs and humans.
