Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) recognise meaningful content in monotonous streams of read speech.

ABSTRACT: Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) can recognize basic phonemic information from human speech and respond to commands. Commands are typically presented in isolation with exaggerated prosody known as dog-directed speech (DDS) register. Here, we investigate whether dogs can spontaneously identify meaningful phonemic content in a stream of putatively irrelevant speech spoken in monotonous prosody, without congruent prosodic cues. To test this ability, dogs were played recordings of their owners reading a meaningless text which included a short meaningful or meaningless phrase, either read with unchanged reading prosody or with an exaggerated DDS prosody. We measured the occurrence and duration of dogs' gaze at their owners. We found that, while dogs were more likely to detect and respond to inc

SUBMITTER: Root-Gutteridge H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11993455 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature