Dogs listen to women more than men.
A team of experts from Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary used fMRI scanners to analyse the brains of pooches when humans were speaking to them and found that the animals showed greater sensitivity to speech directed at them by females.
The study found that the canines responded to the exaggerated tones used by women to grab their attention – with previous research revealing that the infants’ brains are tuned to the same speech style.
Anna Gabor, co-first author of the study, said: “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.”
Fellow expert Anna Gergely added: “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 non-human species skilled at relying on different speech cues (e.g. follow verbal commands).”
