Gaby
Dogs are famously called man’s best friend. A new study suggests we might want to call them women’s best companions instead — dogs seem to listen more closely to women and are more sensitive to women’s voices.
Researchers analyzed dogs’ brain activity while people spoke around them. The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners to study the dogs’ brains and found that puppies were especially sensitive to directed speech, particularly when women were speaking. Anna Gabor, one of the study’s authors at Budapest University, told the Daily Mail that the stronger brain response to women’s speech may be linked to the fact that women often address animals with exaggerated prosody — features like pitch, melody, timbre, rhythm, and loudness — more than men do. When people talk to infants and dogs they tend to use a higher pitch to capture attention. Previous studies have shown that babies’ brains are tuned to this style of speech. Until now, though, researchers had not tested whether dogs’ brains are also sensitive to how we talk to them.
How was the study conducted? Co‑author Anna Hergeli said studying how a dog’s brain processes speech aimed at them is fascinating and could help explain how exaggerated prosody supports effective speech processing in animals that rely on verbal cues, such as following commands. The research team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure dogs’ brain activity while the animals listened to recordings of 12 women and 12 men addressing dogs, infants, and adults. The results showed dogs’ brains reacted more to the parts of the recordings directed at dogs and infants than to speech aimed at adults — and that effect was strongest when the speaker was a woman.
The researchers say dogs’ stronger responses to female voices likely emerged during domestication, indicating dogs are more responsive to higher‑pitched voices. Hergeli said the finding is surprising because, unlike infants, dogs’ sensitivity can’t be explained by an ancient reaction to specific signals or by prenatal exposure to a woman’s voice. She explained, “The intonations of female‑directed speech aren’t typically used in communication between dogs.” So the results suggest dogs developed neural advantages during domestication that make them especially attuned to human female speech.
