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.

与自然韵律相关的声学变化是有关语言组织的重要信息来源。人类婴儿和成人都很容易利用这种变化来发现和记忆语言模式。他们这样做是因为我们的大脑有效地连接到专门处理语言刺激吗？或者我们是否为了语言习得的目的而选择可能从我们的动物祖先那里继承的更普遍的原则？在这里，我们通过探索其他物种是否从韵律中获益以更好地处理声学序列来解决这个问题。更具体地说，我们测试了定义自然韵律的弧形音高轮廓是否可能促进大鼠的项目识别和记忆。在两个实验中，我们向大鼠呈现了具有平坦、自然、倒置和随机韵律轮廓的无意义词。我们观察到，只有当在它们上实施弧形音高轮廓时，动物才能正确识别熟悉词。我们的结果表明，其他物种也可能从韵律中受益，以记住序列中的项目。这种能力似乎植根于生物声音如何产生和处理的一般原则。