Animals Slow speech improves communication with dogs

People slow down their speech when talking to dogs. This enables the four-legged friends to understand them better. This was reported by a team led by Eloïse Déaux from the University of Geneva in a study published in the journal "PLOS Biology" on Tuesday.

According to the study, humans instinctively slow down their speech rate, which is normally around four syllables per second, to around three syllables per second when talking to a dog.

This is probably due to the fact that the speed of communication in humans is generally higher than in dogs, the group writes. Dogs bark, growl and whine at a rate of around two utterances per second.

Better understanding

The authors of the study assume that humans and dogs have different vocal processing systems. However, this does not mean that dogs only understand speech on the basis of so-called prosodic cues, i.e. the tone, melody and rhythm of speech, the researchers emphasized in the study. Dogs are perfectly capable of reacting to the actual content of speech.

Slowing down speech could ultimately have helped humans to establish a better connection with the animals. For example, the cooperation required between dogs and humans to perform work tasks such as hunting and guarding probably necessitated the development of effective interspecific communication skills, the researchers wrote in the study.

For the results on communication between dogs and humans, the scientists used the vocal sounds of 30 dogs and 27 humans who spoke to other humans in a total of five languages. In 22 of these people, their communication with dogs was also analyzed. The researchers examined the brain activity of humans and animals using electroencephalography (EEG).

SDA