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Neural entrainment in dogs suggests human-analogue specialization in speech sound-category processing
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Poster D84 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Attila Andics1,2, Kinga G. Tóth1, Kitti Szabó1, Marianna Boros1, Ivaylo B. Iotchev1; 1Neuroethology of Communication Lab, Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 2ELTE NAP Canine Brain Research Group
Human speech processing appears to depend on assigning different roles to consonants and vowels, with the former sound-category supporting the identification of word boundaries, while vowels provide information on grammar. To date few cross-species comparisons exist, but suggest that humans are uniquely constrained and inflexible in how consonants and vowels are utilized when novel speech input is processed. Dogs which have expanded into the manmade niche since more than 14000 years ago are known to occasionally learn words without explicit training, but it has not been examined if they are uniquely adapted to the perceptual properties of human language, which would include the special roles that consonants and vowels play in providing language with structure. We set out to test how dogs respond to artificial speech while their EEG is measured. Our goal was to observe how the segmentation of continuous sound-streams into words and syllables is affected by assigning different roles (across conditions) to consonants and vowels in providing affordances for structure. Three different speech-streams (one per condition) of 7 minute duration were constructed by concatenating nonsense artificial words, 750 ms long, from three syllables of 250 ms each. In the consonant condition, information about word boundaries was encoded in the consonant patterns, while in the vowel condition word boundaries were defined by vowel patterns. An additional control condition consisted of random syllables which did not form recurrent words. We present data from dogs which attended one condition each, analysing these results in a between-subject design. Using inter-trial coherence (ITC), an established EEG correlate of statistical learning and speech-stream segmentation, we show that in dogs entrainment to the recurrence frequency of syllables (4 Hz) and words (1.3 Hz) is higher when word-identities are defined by consonants as opposed to vowels. In the control condition ITC values were likewise low for 1.3 Hz, but for 4 Hz higher than in the vowel condition. The results suggest that dogs may possess a similar to humans specialization in how sound-categories are utilized when speech is processed. Work with other animals, although sparse, suggests that dogs’ perception of speech-like sounds is affected by their proximity to humans. Syllable entrainment was uniquely suppressed during the vowel condition compared to both the consonant and control conditions. Considering that the conditions differed on the level of word structure, this syllable-level effect may suggest a top-down modulation of speech-stream processing, i.e. that regularities detected on the word-level are used to modulate how syllable-level processing progresses. The findings invite the question if this humanlike processing of vowels and consonants is a phylogenetic or ontogenetic adjustment to an environment dominated by the use of human speech.
Topic Areas: Animal Communication and Comparative/Evolutionary Studies, Speech Perception