Dogs perceive and spontaneously normalize formant-related speaker and vowel differences in human speech sounds.

ABSTRACT: Domesticated animals have been shown to recognize basic phonemic information from human speech sounds and to recognize familiar speakers from their voices. However, whether animals can spontaneously identify words across unfamiliar speakers (speaker normalization) or spontaneously discriminate between unfamiliar speakers across words remains to be investigated. Here, we assessed these abilities in domestic dogs using the habituation-dishabituation paradigm. We found that while dogs habituated to the presentation of a series of different short words from the same unfamiliar speaker, they significantly dishabituated to the presentation of a novel word from a new speaker of the same gender. This suggests that dogs spontaneously categorized the initial speaker across different words. Conversel

SUBMITTER: Root-Gutteridge H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6936018 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature