Our Dogs Totally Eavesdrop on Us, New Study Finds
They’re always listening.
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If you’ve ever noticed your dog’s ears perk up during a conversation with your friend — say, when the two of you are discussing whether you should treat yourselves and go out to fetch a bite — you’re not imagining things. Your pup really is listening, the nosy little eavesdropper. A new studyopens in a new tab published in Animal Cognition found that dogs recognize meaningful content in a stream of human speech.
Previous studiesopens in a new tab have found that humans often speak to dogs in a specific cadence (called dog-directed speech, or DDS), similar to the way people speak to infantsopens in a new tab. This type of speech helps attract a dog’s attention and make recognition easier. But researchers wanted to find out how well dogs respond to their favorite words when they’re not directed to them in a unique voice.
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Researchers recorded 57 dog-parents reading aloud from short passages. After a few standard sentences, they incorporated a test phrase — followed by the quote that explains the test phrase.
David Reby, the study’s lead author, explains in the study’s abstract: “The non-meaningful (control) phrases were ‘[Alfie / Bertie], pass me a coffee!’, and the meaningful phrase was ‘[Dog’s name], come on then!’, chosen as these words had the highest frequency of use by English-speaking owners during interactions with their dogs and were therefore likely to be meaningful to all dogs,” Pet parents recorded the speech in two different ways: first in a normal voice, and then in DDS.
They found that dogs consistently looked toward their pet parents after hearing their names; they were slightly more likely to look at their pet parent when they heard the name in DDC. But they also detected their name when it was said in an neutral reading tone.
“Our research shows that dogs are able to pick out and recognize words relevant to them in a monotonous stream of otherwise irrelevant speech, even in the absence of the intonation cues we usually use to engage them,” Reby said in a statement. opens in a new tab
In other words, your dog’s tuned into your conversations, whether you’re talking to them in a sweet, high-pitched voice, or droning to another human. But hey, they follow you to the bathroom,opens in a new tab too — so you probably came to peace with sacrificing your privacy a long time ago.
Sio Hornbuckle
Sio Hornbuckle is a writer living in New York City with their cat, Toni Collette.
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