“WHO’S A CUTE PUPPY?” ASKS AAAS Science, September 15, 2023, in a Research item titled “Auditory Processing.” The item is based on a paper by Anna Gergely et al. published in Communications Biology: “Dog Brains Are Sensitive to Infant- and Dog-directed Prosody.” Here are tidbits gleaned from both.
Baby Talk. “Humans,” Science reports, “often talk to their dogs in a voice similar to the one they use with infants: high pitched and rich in prosody [a rhythmic and intonational aspect of language]. Many studies have shown that infants respond better to these types of voices, in particular, those of women.”
Here at SimanaitisSays, we’ve discussed “Baby Talk—Dolphin Style,” in which dolphin moms exhibit similar behavior. This latest research, though, is focused on interspecies communication: us to our canine pals.
Methodology. Science recounts, “Gregely et al. trained dogs to sit still within a functional MRI machine and played them various voices to determine whether they too prefer prosodic female voices.”
Image from Science, September 15, 2023.
Recalling enthusiastic interactions with Kenwood, our Husky Malamute pal of 19 years, I am amazed by this particular fact of training “dogs to sit still.” Our only dog trick with Kenwood was to cajole him to sit during which Wife Dottie and I sang “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah/ Zip-a-dee-ay./ My, oh, my, what a wonderful day,” after which he jumped around us as we cried “Wacka! Wacka!”
You hadda be there.
MRI Results. By contrast, Science reported, “Upon hearing speech that was dog- and infant-directed (and thus prosodic), the dogs displayed increased brain activity in a region involved in auditory processing, especially when the speaker was female.”
Images from Gergely et al. Above, basic frequency analyses (F0) of Dog-directed (DDS), Infant-directed (IDS), and Adult-directed (ADS) speech from females (F) and males (M). Below, MRI activity in canine left caudal Sylvian gyrus. All sounds greater than whole brain random effects.
In their Abstract, researchers say, “we identify two non-primary auditory regions, one that involve the ventralmost part of the left caudal Sylvian gyrus, which respond more to naturalistic dog- and/or infant-directed speech than to adult-directed speech, especially when speak by female speakers.”
I suspect the oddities of English are translation-dependent: Researchers are Hungarian, several at Eötvös Loránd University, the oldest (1635) and largest university in Hungary. By the way, its current name honors (in native fashion) Hungarian physicist Loránd Eötvös (here, his given name first in Western fashion).
Baron Loránd Eötvös de Vásárosnamény, 1848–1914, Hungarian physicist, recognized today for his work in gravitation and surface tension, inventor of the torsion pendulum. Image, 1912, by Aladár Székely from Wikipedia.
Whence This Canine Ability? Science says, “Such preferences could not be due to intrauterine exposure to females, as has been suggested for infants, and points to alternative hypotheses for its cause, such as domestication or ontogenetic learning.”
Dogs Are Special. Gergely and her colleagues conclude, “This increased neuronal responsiveness to exaggerated prosody may be one reason why dogs outperform other animals when processing speech.”
I believe I can account for why cats are not included in such research: No researcher would want to wait until a cat thought, on its own accord, of sitting still in that MRI thing. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023