A new study published in the Communications Biology found that dogs are more likely to listen better to women than men for a surprising reason.
It turns out that when we, hoomanstalk to dogs, we tend to use a style of speech that we also use when interacting with babies.
The authors called it “exaggerated prosody”, but we commonly call it the singing voice.
But what is the reason that dogs listen to women better than men? The study found that dogs react to words spoken to them, especially when it comes to a female, as females tend to speak to dogs in a singsong voice more than males.
The study found that different genders use the singing voice differently. Females hyperarticulate their vowels more than males and tend to talk to dogs more in naturally playful situations.
The study was conducted by researchers from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. They performed brain scans on trained dogs to find evidence that dogs are actually sensitive to how people talk to them.
![Female owner playing with cheerful dog at home](https://www.dogingtonpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Female-owner-playing-with-joyful-dog-at-home-1024x683.jpg)
Anna Gergely, co-first author of the study, said in a Press release, “Studying how the dog brain processes dog-directed speech is exciting because it may help us understand how exaggerated prosody contributes to efficient speech processing in a non-human species that can rely on different vocal cues ( for example, following verbal commands).”
During the MRI, trained dogs listened to actual speech samples collected from various men and women interacting with dogs, babies and adults.
Additionally, the study results are our first evidence that dogs are actually “listening to the speech that is specifically intended for them.”
Anna Gábor, co-first author of the study also said: “What makes this finding particularly interesting is that in dogs, unlike infants, this sensitivity cannot be explained either by long-standing reactivity to cues from conspecifics, or by intrauterine exposure to female voices.”
Gábor also said the result of their study could serve as further evidence that dogs’ neural preference was something they had developed during their domestication.
“Remarkably, the tone-of-voice patterns that characterize female dog-led speech are not typically used in dog-dog communication” Gabor explains.