Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) recognise meaningful content in monotonous streams of read speech

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 in which we inserted 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 inserts that contained meaningful phrases spoken with DDS prosody, they were still able to detect these meaningful inserts spoken in a neutral reading prosody. Dogs detected and responded to meaning..., Stimuli
70 owners were recorded reading aloud one of three short (15-20 second) passages from the standard psychology text “the rainbow passage” (Fairbanks, 1960), with the test phrases produced after 7-12 seconds as part of the text. 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 (Mitchell and Edmonson, 1999). The duration of the target phrases was between 0.7s and 2.5s (mean = 1.4s, std. dev. = 0.2), depending on the speaker’s natural talking speed and the dog’s name (e.g., “Badger” takes longer to say than “Max”). In total, three different extracts of the same length were used and the phrases were included within the sentences, i.e., “There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one..., There are no missing values., # Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) recognise meaningful content in monotonous streams of read speech

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.stqjq2c1s](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.stqjq2c1s)

Holly Root-Gutteridge, University of Sussex, [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

Data collected between 2018 and 2022 in HAVOC lab at University of Sussex Falmer campus. Data analysed using Praat speech analysis software and Sportscode Gamebreak video analysis software.

Keywords: dog-directed speech, heterospecific communication, speech recognition, human-animal communication, Canis familiaris, speech prosody

**Rainbow_Passage_Texts.docx** documents the excerpts from the psychology text the rainbow passage used for the recorded speeches to the dogs. From Fairbanks, G. (1960). Voice and articulation drillbook, 2nd edn. New York: Harper & Row. pp124-139.

**ESM Tables 3-8.docx** are the full results from the generalised linear mixed model analysis of the data performed in SPSS. C...