Dogs’ brains are sensitive to the familiar high-pitched “cute” voice tone that adult humans, especially women, use to talk to babies, according to a new study.
The research, published recently in the journal Communications Biology, found “exciting similarities” between infant and dog brains during the processing of speech with such a high-pitched tone feature.
Humans tend to speak with a specific speech style characterised by exaggerated prosody, or patterns of stress and intonation in a language, when communicating with individuals having limited language competence.
Such speech has previously been found to be very important for the healthy cognitive, social and language development of children, who are also tuned to such a high-pitched voice.
But researchers, including those from the Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, hoped to assess whether dog brains are also sensitive to this way of communication.
In the study, conscious family dogs were made to listen to dog, infant and adult-directed speech recorded from 12 women and men in real-life interactions.
As the dogs listened, their brain activities were measured using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan.
The study found the sound-processing regions of the dogs’ brains responded more to dog- and infant-directed than adult-directed speech.
This marked the first neurological evidence that dog brains are tuned to speech directed specifically at them.
“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,” explained Anna Gergely, co-first author of the study.
Scientists also found dog- and infant-directed speech sensitivity of dog brains was more pronounced when the speakers were women, and was affected by voice pitch and its variation.
These findings suggest the way we speak to dogs matters, and that their brain is specifically sensitive to the higher-pitched voice tone typical to the female voice.
“Remarkably, the voice tone patterns characterizing women’s dog-directed speech are not typically used in dog-dog communication – our results may thus serve evidence for a neural preference that dogs developed during their domestication,” said Anna Gábor, co-first author of the study.
“Dog brains’ increased sensitivity to dog-directed speech spoken by women specifically may be due to the fact that women more often speak to dogs with exaggerated prosody than men,” Dr Gabor said.
He waits for an owner who will never come back, rotting from sickness and starvation
A girl from pokhrofskoy richardalovsky ukraine submitted a facebook message to a local animal shelter she claimed that near her house an owner departed for a month, the owner of this house left two miserable dogs chained lately.
This girl poster’s name is xenia detected a rotten smell in this house of course she was ridiculed a lot xenia panics and deletes the post.
The rescuer team of that local shelter did not have any information, no address, no phone number, and after they viewed the sorrowful photographs, they were resolved to locate to save these two poor pets.
After almost three hours of travelling and questioning individuals they got to the house. After breaking the lock they get entry to the house a terrible rotten smell was rising up, tragically one baby did not survive.
The other was a labrador, he was just bones and terrible sick, he was starving for days, he wept a lot and his tears are still pouring. Maybe he was terribly sad. He was afraid and didn’t dare look at savior.
They named him Boss.
The weary baby was being transported in the vehicle to vet, Boss is being examined after the blood transfusion the baby will be cared for at the Vet for a bit.
Boss has a terrific appetite, he is eating well which is a wonderful, he is an exceptionally clever man.
Boss is evolving every day, he was released and welcomed at a temporary house, he is waiting for a joyful home.
Finally something fantastic occurred, Boss was adopted by a family in kiev, Boss’s magnificent adventure has started.
Now is the moment when we look forward to watching this angel’s joyful days. Boss is really gorgeous he loves everything he has a great family.
“We appreciate his new family so much we will always miss you Boss”
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