Dogs, often hailed as man’s best friend, surprisingly exhibit a preference for female voices, as revealed by a recent study.
Researchers from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary conducted brain scans on dogs, demonstrating that dogs indeed listen when humans talk to them. Interestingly, their response mirrors that of infants, showing a preference for specific tones.
Infants respond positively to a soft, melodious speech style that emphasizes vowels, and research suggests that this exaggerated speech style can positively influence a child’s brain development.
However, unlike infants, dogs are not exposed to female voices in utero, and high-pitched speech is not common in dog-to-dog communication, as reported by Science Alert.
So, what makes dogs prefer female voices and “baby talk”?
Dogs Show a Preference for Female Voices, Similar to Babies
To investigate this, the research team trained 19 dogs of eight different breeds, aged between 2 and 10 years, to enter an fMRI machine and stay still long enough for their brains to be scanned.
Each dog, while in the machine, listened to three types of pre-recorded human speech: speech directed at dogs, speech directed at infants, and speech directed at an adult. The speaker in the recording was sometimes an adult male and sometimes an adult female.
The results showed that dogs exhibited increased activity in their auditory cortex when they heard the exaggerated voices typically used for pets or babies, particularly when the speaker was a woman.
Neuroethologist Anna Gábor from Eötvös Loránd University suggests that this “could be because women tend to use exaggerated prosody more often when speaking to dogs,” referring to elements of speech such as tone, stress, rhythm, and emotion.
How Did This Trait Evolve in Dogs?
In the brain scans, human voices were processed in a secondary part of the dogs’ auditory cortex, known as the temporal pole, and in the Sylvian gyrus, an area between the temporal, frontal, and parietal lobes.
Previous studies have observed a similar brain response in babies when they hear “baby talk.” As for how our pet dogs may have developed this human-like trait, scientists propose two main theories.
One theory suggests an ancient and universal sensitivity among mammals to higher-pitched sounds with greater frequency variability. The other theory posits that this was a characteristic humans selected for when domesticating wolves.
Gábor and her colleagues speculate that pre-domesticated dogs more sensitive to dog-directed speech “may have had more opportunities to stay close to humans and pay attention to their vocal cues.”
Some evidence suggests that wolves respond more to low-pitched speech, while dogs respond more to higher-pitched speech. Gábor’s team included only 19 dogs in the study, and it was not adjusted based on the sex of the pet owners, which could influence the types of speech the dogs were most sensitive to.
Future Research Could Shed Light on Human Evolution
While further research is needed, the authors believe that the similarities they found between how dogs and babies respond to adult voices warrant further investigation. Our pets may prove to be a valuable model for understanding our pre-verbal selves.
The study was published in Communications Biology.
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