Arc-shaped pitch contours facilitate item recognition in non-human animals

Acoustic changes linked to natural prosody are a key source of information about the organization of language. Both human infants and adults readily take advantage of such changes to discover and memorize linguistic patterns. Do they so because our brain is efficiently wired to specifically process linguistic stimuli? Or are we co-opting for language acquisition purposes more general principles that might be inherited from our animal ancestors? Here, we address this question by exploring if other species profit from prosody to better process acoustic sequences. More specifically, we test whether arc-shaped pitch contours defining natural prosody might facilitate item recognition and memorization in rats. In two experiments, we presented to the rats nonsense words with flat, natural, inverted and random prosodic contours. We observed that the animals correctly recognized the familiarization words only when arc-shaped pitch contours were implemented over them. Our results suggest that other species might also benefit from prosody for the memorization of items in a sequence. Such capacity seems to be rooted in general principles of how biological sounds are produced and processed.