03.12.2024 - Attila Andics

A central objective of language evolution research is to understand how brain capacities for efficient speech processing emerged and whether they are unique to humans. Answering these questions requires comparisons not only with evolutionarily proximate species but also with socially proximate ones. Companion dogs, which navigate efficiently in the human social niche, are an ideal study population to complement primate research on the phylogenetic and experiential contributions to the neural bases of speech perception. Over the last decade our lab has been conducting non-invasive EEG and fMRI on awake, cooperating dogs using no restraints or sedation. This is only done in very few labs worldwide and has not yet been done with any other animals. In this talk I will overview some of our latest behavioural and neuroimaging findings on dogs' capacities for communicative cueing; speech segmentation and word learning; phonetic, prosodic and lexical processing; and language representations. I will highlight exciting similarities but also remarkable differences to corresponding human capacities.