Science Determines: A Dog Is Truly a Woman’s Best Friend

An old proverb says that “ dog it’s man’s best friend”, but a recent scientific study should lead to a change in the motto to “dogs as women’s true partners”.

This is because dogs show greater brain sensitivity to speech addressed to them, especially when it is spoken by women, according to a new US study. Communication biology.

In an fMRI study on trained dogs, Hungarian researchers from the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Lorand University, the Science Research Center and the Eötvös Lorand Research Network found striking similarities between the brains of infants and dogs during speech processing with exaggerated prosody. .

Prosody deals with the most limited language understanding and deserves special, slower speech and word stress.

To answer this question, the Hungarian researchers measured a dog’s brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). On MRI, trained and aware family dogs listened to dog-guided speech of a child and an adult recorded by 12 women and 12 men during real-life interactions.

“Studying how the dog brain processes dog-guided speech is interesting because it can help us understand how exaggerated prosody promotes efficient speech processing in non-human species that can rely on various speech cues (e.g., following verbal commands). )”. explains Anna Gergeli, co-author of the study.

Interestingly, the speech sensitivity of the dog’s brain to the dog and child was more pronounced when the speakers were women and was influenced by the tone of voice and its variations. These results show that how we talk to our dogs matters and that their brains are particularly sensitive to the exaggerated prosody that is typical of the female voice.

“What makes this result particularly interesting is that in dogs, unlike infants, this sensitivity cannot be explained either by an ancient reaction to signals from congeners or by prenatal exposure to female voices. Surprisingly, the tone of voice that characterizes female speech to a dog is not commonly used in dog-to-dog communication; our results may serve as evidence for the neural preferences that dogs have developed during domestication.”

“The increased sensitivity of the dog brain to female-specific directed speech may be due to the fact that females are more likely to talk to dogs with exaggerated prosody than males,” explains Anna Gabor, co-author of the study.