When dogs hear their owners speak, they are listening for consonants in words rather than vowels, a new study suggests, apparently mimicking a similar human bias that is found across many languages. Although dogs don’t have language, they live in a speech-rich environment, says Attila Andics at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. Andics says while many Eastern European languages are consonant heavy, Hungarian isn’t.
During the experiment, the human and dog participants separately listened to continuous, unsegmented speech streams of nonsense words while connected to EEG monitors, measuring the electrical activity of the participants’ brains. Consonants and vowels alternated throughout these streams, with no pauses or other acoustic cues separating them, says Andics. There were three types of nonsense streams.
In the first, recurring consonant patterns formed consecutive three-syllable words – such as “mozite”. In the second, stronger vowel patterns formed the skeleton of the words – such as “zobefu”. And in the third, there were no recurring patterns at all, with syllables in a random order – such as “fumoza”.
He says the team made use of a phenomenon called “neural synchronisation”, in which brain activity can take on the rhythm that we detect in the sounds we hear. In dogs, the neural response to consonant-based regularities was 42 per cent stronger than the response to vowel-based regularities, and 55 per cent stronger than the response to the random stream. In humans, the response to consonant-patterned words was nearly 25 per cent higher than to vowel-based regularities and 77 per cent higher than to the random condition.The team thinks that dogs who weren’t exposed to human speech wouldn’t have this bias, although they haven’t yet tested this idea.
Babies born too soon seem to have stronger connections in one of the major brain areas that supports language processing if they regularly heard their mother read them a story while in intensive care Nick Enfield at the University of Sydney, Australia, says the team convincingly shows that these dogs display more sensitivity to statistical patterns in consonants, rather than in vowels. But with some important caveats – especially that these are Hungarian dogs, living with Hungarian speakers. But if you do want your dog to pay attention to you, there may be a practical take home, he says.
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