Root-Gutteridge Holly, Korzeniowska Anna, Ratcliffe Victoria, Reby David
School of Psychology, University of Sussex, Falmer, East Sussex, UK.
School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, UK.
Anim Cogn. 2025 Apr 12;28(1):29. doi: 10.1007/s10071-025-01948-z.
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 inclusions that contained meaningful phrases spoken with DDS prosody, they were still able to detect these meaningful inclusions spoken in a neutral reading prosody. Dogs detected and responded to meaningless control phrases in DDS as frequently as to meaningful content in neutral reading prosody, but less often than to meaningful content in DDS. This suggests that, while DDS prosody facilitates the detection of meaningful content in human speech by capturing dogs' attention, dogs are nevertheless capable of spontaneously recognizing meaningful phonemic content within an unexaggerated stream of speech.
家犬（犬属）能够识别人类语音中的基本音素信息并对指令做出反应。指令通常以孤立的形式呈现，并带有夸张的韵律，即所谓的“面向狗的语音”（DDS）语调。在此，我们研究狗是否能够在没有一致韵律线索的情况下，自发地从单调韵律的假定无关语音流中识别出有意义的音素内容。为了测试这种能力，我们给狗播放了它们主人朗读一篇无意义文本的录音，其中包含一个简短的有意义或无意义的短语，朗读时要么韵律不变，要么采用夸张的DDS韵律。我们测量了狗注视主人的次数和时长。我们发现，虽然狗更有可能察觉到并对用DDS韵律说出的包含有意义短语的内容做出反应，但它们仍然能够察觉到用中性朗读韵律说出的这些有意义的内容。狗对DDS中的无意义对照短语的察觉和反应频率与对中性朗读韵律中的有意义内容的察觉和反应频率相同，但低于对DDS中有意义内容的察觉和反应频率。这表明，虽然DDS韵律通过吸引狗的注意力促进了对人类语音中有意义内容的察觉，但狗仍然能够在未夸张的语音流中自发地识别出有意义的音素内容。
