Dogs are well-known as man’s best friend. However, a new study suggests that we might want to start calling them women’s best companions, as they seem to listen better to women than to men. Dogs are more sensitive to women’s voices.
Researchers analyzed the brain activity of dogs while people spoke around them. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners were used to study the dogs’ brains. It turned out that puppies exhibited greater sensitivity to directed speech, especially when spoken to by women. As Anna Gabor, one of the study’s authors from Budapest University, noted in the Daily Mail, the heightened sensitivity of a dog’s brain to women’s addresses may be linked to the fact that women often speak to animals with exaggerated prosody—additional rhythmic and intonational features of speech, including pitch, melody, timbre, rhythm, volume, and loudness—more than men do. When people communicate with infants and dogs, they tend to use a higher pitch to capture their attention. Previous studies have shown that babies’ brains are tuned to this style of speech. However, until now, scientists had not assessed whether dogs’ brains are also sensitive to how we talk to them.
How was the study conducted? Co-author Anna Hergeli pointed out that studying how a dog’s brain processes speech directed at them is fascinating. This could help us understand how exaggerated prosody aids in effective speech processing in animals that rely on various linguistic signals, such as following verbal commands. The research team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity of dogs. During the scans, the pets listened to recordings of 12 women and 12 men addressing dogs, infants, and adults. The results showed that dogs’ brains reacted more to the segments of the recordings directed specifically at dogs and infants than to speech aimed at adults. However, this effect was even more pronounced when the speaker was a woman.
Better responses to female voices emerged during dog domestication. According to the researchers, this indicates that dogs respond better to higher-pitched voices. Ms. Hergeli noted that what makes this finding particularly interesting is that, unlike infants, dogs’ sensitivity cannot be explained by an ancient reaction to specific signals or the prenatal influence of a woman’s voice. “Interestingly, the intonations of voice that characterize female speech directed at dogs are typically not used in communication between dogs,” she explained. Thus, the results may serve as evidence of the neural advantages these animals have developed during domestication.