Dogs may be able to tell difference between speech patterns, study finds

[littlemissmartypants]

Dogs react differently to speech and non-speech when listening to human voices, say researchers

Nicola Davis Science correspondent
@NicolaKSDavis
Thu 6 Jan 2022 05.30 EST

Dogs may appear to have selective hearing when it comes to commands but research suggests they are paying attention to human chit-chat.

Researchers – who arranged for headphone-wearing dogs to listen to excerpts from the novella The Little Prince – revealed the brains of our canine companions can tell the difference between speech and non-speech when listening to human voices, and show different responses to speech in an unfamiliar language.

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“Our capacities to process speech and languages are not necessarily unique in all the ways we like to think they are,” said Dr Attila Andics, senior author of the study at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.

The research involved 18 dogs of various ages and breeds that were trained to lie in an MRI scanner without restraint or sedation, but with headphones on. They were then played recordings either of humans reading excerpts from The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry or those same recordings cut up into small pieces and put back together in a different order so it sounded unnatural.

The results, published in the journal NeuroImage, reveal the dogs’ brains showed a different activity pattern in the primary auditory cortex for speech compared with non-speech, with the findings similar regardless of whether the language used – Hungarian or Spanish – was familiar. Curiously, the longer the dog’s head was, the better their brain could distinguish speech from non-speech.

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More at the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/jan/06/dogs-may-be-able-to-tell-difference-between-speech-patterns-study-finds

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