Neural mechanisms for lexical processing in dogs

What is it about?

In this first study on how dogs proces human speech, we found that dog brains process both what we say (with a left hemipshere dominance) and how we say it (in a right auditory brain region). And dogs not only separately analyze word meaning and intonation, but also combine them to arrive at a unified meaning. Reward regions only showed increased activity when both lexical and intonational information were consistent with praise.

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Why is it important?

Words may be a human invention, but we now see that the neural mechanisms to process them are not uniqely human. We suggest that in a suitable ontogenetic environment lexical representations can arise and be separated from acoustics, even in a non-primate mammal.