  We investigate the chiral extrapolation of the lattice data for the
light-heavy meson hyperfine splittings D^*-D and B^*-B to the physical region
for the light quark mass. The chiral loop corrections providing non-analytic
behavior in m_\pi are consistent with chiral perturbation theory for heavy
mesons. Since chiral loop corrections tend to decrease the already too low
splittings obtained from linear extrapolation, we investigate two models to
guide the form of the analytic background behavior: the constituent quark
potential model, and the covariant model of QCD based on the ladder-rainbow
truncation of the Dyson-Schwinger equations. The extrapolated hyperfine
splittings remain clearly below the experimental values even allowing for the
model dependence in the description of the analytic background.
