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When dogs hear their owners speak, they are listening for consonants in words rather than vowels, a new study suggests, apparently mimicking a similar human bias that is found across many languages.

Although dogs don鈥檛 have language, they live in a speech-rich environment, says at E枚tv枚s Lor谩nd University in Hungary.

鈥淲e knew from our previous studies that dogs care about what we speak and how we speak, but until now there was no evidence that dogs鈥� experience with speech can actually shape how their brains function,鈥� says Andics.

To investigate how a life with humans and listening to constant talk has impacted dogs鈥� brains, Andics and his colleagues recruited 20 adult human Hungarian speakers and 20 companion dogs with Hungarian owners.

Andics says while many Eastern European languages are consonant heavy, Hungarian isn鈥檛.

鈥淭here are some studies suggesting that consonant bias during speech segmentation is weaker, or not there, in people who mostly listen to Mandarin or Danish, in which languages consonants are not, or not that much, more informative about word boundaries than vowels,鈥� he says.

During the experiment, the human and dog participants separately listened to continuous, unsegmented speech streams of nonsense words while connected to EEG monitors, measuring the electrical activity of the participants鈥� brains.

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Consonants and vowels alternated throughout these streams, with no pauses or other acoustic cues separating them, says Andics.

There were three types of nonsense streams. In the first, recurring consonant patterns formed consecutive three-syllable words 鈥� such as 鈥渕ozite鈥�. In the second, stronger vowel patterns formed the skeleton of the words 鈥� such as 鈥渮obefu鈥�. And in the third, there were no recurring patterns at all, with syllables in a random order 鈥� such as 鈥渇umoza鈥�.

He says the team made use of a phenomenon called 鈥渘eural synchronisation鈥�, in which brain activity can take on the rhythm that we detect in the sounds we hear.

鈥淭he more reliably we detect that rhythm, the more rhythmic the brain response becomes,鈥� says Andics. 鈥淲e expected that if a species鈥� brain has a preference for consonants, it should follow the rhythm of the words more easily when consonants form the structure of those words.鈥�

The difference was substantial, the scientists found. In dogs, the neural response to consonant-based regularities was 42 per cent stronger than the response to vowel-based regularities, and 55 per cent stronger than the response to the random stream.

鈥淪o, this is how much more dog brains tracked word rhythm when consonants defined the words,鈥� says Andics.

In humans, the response to consonant-patterned words was nearly 25 per cent higher than to vowel-based regularities and 77 per cent higher than to the random condition.
The team thinks that dogs who weren鈥檛 exposed to human speech wouldn鈥檛 have this bias, although they haven鈥檛 yet tested this idea.

鈥淲e argue that the only reason companion dogs have a consonant bias is that human speech, and specifically the characteristics of words, reshaped their brains,鈥� says Andics.

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at the University of Sydney, Australia, says the team convincingly shows that these dogs display more sensitivity to statistical patterns in consonants, rather than in vowels.

But with some important caveats 鈥� especially that these are Hungarian dogs, living with Hungarian speakers.

鈥淭here鈥檚 7000 different languages in the world and some of them rely a lot more on things like tonal distinctions,鈥� says Enfield. But if you do want your dog to pay attention to you, there may be a practical take home, he says.

鈥淭he lesson here may be to give your dog a name with more consonants in it than one with more vowels.鈥�