Neural evidence that dogs segment the speech they hear with a humanlike consonant bias

Across many human languages, consonants carry more lexical information than vowels. During speech segmentation, humans, unlike nonhuman primates, rely more on consonant than vowel patterns, despite vowels’ greater acoustic saliency. To investigate whether this consonant bias is specific to humans or could also emerge in other species exposed to human speech, we performed noninvasive electroencephalography in humans and dogs. Intertrial coherence measures of neural entrainment and event-related potentials revealed enhanced word-level tracking for consonant- compared with vowel-structured streams in both species. This suggests that dogs, similar to humans, exhibit consonant bias when segmenting the speech they hear. Linguistic regularity–based processing biases can thus also emerge in a nonspeaking species exposed to speech.