Associative memory comprises linking together component parts (e.g., sounds and meaning) either directly or via spatial, temporal or other kinds of relationships. The idea of associative encoding is at the core of distributional semantics, which states that words occurring together are usually semantically related. Prior studies on associative memory encodings have localized the medial temporal lobes for associative recall in both the animal and human brain, yet fine-grained mechanistic models of the associating process are still lacking. The proposed study exposes both rats and human adults to sequences of vowel sounds varying in lexical tones during electroencephalogram (EEG) recording. We then test whether the co-occurring statistics of two consecutive tones during exposure facilitate tone pairings using a two-choice auditory task. We leverage recent deep-learning techniques to model the processes of associating two tones together in the rat and human auditory cortex.