Dogs show greater brain sensitivity to the speech directed at them than to adult-directed speech, especially if spoken by women, according to a new study in Communications Biology.
"Studying how dog brains process dog-directed speech is exciting, because it can help us understand how exaggerated prosody contributes to efficient speech processing in a nonhuman species skilled at relying on different speech cues ," Anna Gergely, co-first author of the study explains.
Interestingly, dog- and infant-directed speech sensitivity of dog brains was more pronounced when the speakers were women and was affected by voice pitch and its variation. These results suggest that the way we speak to our dogs does matter, and that their"What makes this result particularly interesting is that in dogs, as opposed to infants, this sensitivity cannot be explained by either ancient responsiveness to conspecific signals or by intrauterine exposure to women's voice.
"Dog brains' increased sensitivity to dog-directed speech spoken by women specifically may be due to the fact that women more often speak to dogs with exaggerated prosody than men," explains Anna Gábor, co-first author of the study.Communications Biology
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