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fMRI evidence for phonetic detail-insensitive word processing in dogs
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Poster D83 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Dorottya Rácz1, Marianna Boros1, Bernadett Paska1, Attila Andics1,2; 1Neuroethology of Communication Lab, Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, 2ELTE NAP Canine Brain Research Group
Understanding words requires several processing steps, from the acoustic analysis of a series of sounds to accessing word meaning. While the capacity for certain prelexical processing steps from auditory stimuli, such as speech sound discrimination, is common among animals, evidence for the recognition of sequences of sounds and the understanding of their meaning is scarce in non-humans. Nevertheless, recent reports on dogs’ lexical processing capacities suggested that even non-primate mammals may process higher-level information and advances in dog neuroimaging revealed remarkable similarities in how dog and human brains process speech. However, it is debated whether dogs have similar abilities to humans in accessing the phonetic details of words during lexical processing. While a behavioural study has suggested that dogs may attribute a meaning-changing role to a single speech sound in a word, an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment has found no evidence for that. It is also an open question whether the previously identified brain areas involved in lexical processing are sensitive to the phonetic details of words. The aim of the present study was to investigate phonetic sensitivity during lexical processing in the canine brain. Twenty awake, unrestrained dogs were presented with (1) instruction words (WORD), (2) phonetically similar (SIM, differing in only the first vowel) and (3) dissimilar nonsense words (NONW) during the experiment, while the elicited brain activity was measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The animals were all trained previously to lie motionless in the scanner throughout the test using positive reinforcement. We found that certain auditory cortical brain areas previously found to be involved in the lexical processing of praise words (mid and caudal ectosylvian gyrus) responded stronger to instruction words than to dissimilar nonwords. However, the activity elicited by instruction words and phonetically similar nonwords did not differ in these regions. Furthermore, in a whole-brain analysis comparing the WORD and SIM conditions with the NONW condition we also revealed a significant cluster outside the auditory cortex, extending to the mid cingulate gyrus, which in humans is associated with cognitive control and decision making during social interactions. These findings suggest the presence of lexical representations in dogs’ near-primary and secondary auditory cortex not only for praise but also for instruction words, and reveal that these representations lack phonetic detail, corroborating recent electrophysiological evidence. Finally, the increased activity in an executive region to these instruction-for-action words may reflect that dogs could not only recognize speech sound sequences but also access word meanings.
Topic Areas: Animal Communication and Comparative/Evolutionary Studies, Speech Perception