A new study published in Communications Biology has uncovered a surprising explanation for why dogs tend to respond more readily to women than to men.
As it happens, when humans talk to dogs, we naturally slip into the same speech pattern we use with infants.
Researchers call this pattern “exaggerated prosody,” though most of us would simply describe it as a singsong tone of voice.
So why exactly do dogs pick up on women’s voices more readily? According to the study, dogs tune in more to speech aimed directly at them, and this effect is stronger with women largely because women are more likely than men to speak to dogs in that exaggerated, musical tone.
The research also revealed that men and women don’t use this singsong style in quite the same way. Women tend to over-enunciate their vowels compared to men and are more likely to chat with dogs during relaxed, playful moments.
The research team, based at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, ran brain scans on trained dogs to gather concrete evidence that dogs really are sensitive to how people speak to them.
Anna Gergely, one of the study’s co-first authors, explained in a press release: “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 (e.g. follow verbal commands).”
During the brain scans, the trained dogs were played genuine speech recordings taken from a mix of men and women speaking with dogs, infants, and other adults.
What’s more, these findings mark the first solid evidence that dogs are genuinely “tuned to the speech directed specifically at them.”
Co-first author Anna Gábor added, “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.”
Gábor noted that this outcome may offer additional support for the idea that dogs’ neural preference for this kind of speech emerged sometime during the domestication process.
“Remarkably, the voice tone patterns characterizing women’s dog-directed speech are not typically used in dog-dog communication,” Gábor explains.
