Researchers specifically looked at what they called “exaggerated prosody,” meaning the exaggerated, sing-song inflections and rhythms humans often use when talking to animals and babies.
The study found heightened sensitivity – particularly in two separate regions of the dogs’ brains – when exposed to exaggerated speech of the type usually directed toward infants and animals, compared to the dogs’ response to the tone of voice people use to communicate with other adult humans.
“Remarkably, the voice tone patterns characterizing women’s dog-directed speech are not typically used in dog-dog communication,” one of the researchers wrote in a post on Phys.org, meaning that “our results may thus serve evidence for a neural preference that dogs developed during their domestication.”
As the researchers note in their publication, existing evidence indicates that the exaggerated speech used with dogs and babies “possesses general acoustic characteristics to call and maintain the attention of a social partner with limited linguistic competence.” This would suggest that a similarly measurable brain response would exist in babies as well, although performing such a study would be challenging. As the researchers note, the major limitation of their study is that the sample group was limited to those dogs that could be trained to stay still in an MRI machine while their owners talked to them.If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation.
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