Dog brains segment speech into words in a way previously seen only in humans, a new study from Hungary finds. This suggests that efficient speech processing is not necessarily a consequence of humans’ unique language abilities: Regular exposure to speech alone can reshape how the brain functions, even in a mammalian species evolutionarily distant from humans. The discovery by the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at the ELTE Department of Ethology in Budapest is published in Science.

Humans and language have a unique relationship. No other species possesses language abilities as complex as ours, and the human brain is particularly sensitive to the characteristics of speech. But there is a longstanding mystery: Do we process speech so efficiently because our brains are inherently built this way, or because we are constantly exposed to speech?

“Words are made up of two main types of speech sounds: vowels and consonants. Although vowels are louder and more noticeable, consonants usually form the skeleton of words. In a continuous speech stream, it is easier to detect individual words when we focus on consonants. And from infancy onward, this is exactly what the human brain tends to do. This phenomenon is known as the consonant bias,” says Attila Andics, a cognitive neuroscientist, head of the Neuroethology of Communication Lab and corresponding author of the study.