Dogs' sensory-motor tuning shapes dog-human vocal interactions

Abstract

Within species, vocal and auditory systems co-evolve to converge on a critical temporal acoustic structure that can be best produced and perceived. While dogs cannot produce articulated sounds, they respond to speech, raising the question as to whether this heterospecific receptive ability is shaped by exposure to speech or bounded by their own sensorimotor capacity. Acoustic analyses of vocalisations show that dogs main production rhythm is slower than the dominant (syllabic) speech rate, and that human dog-directed speech falls halfway in between. Comparative exploration of neural (electroencephalography) and behavioural responses to speech reveals that comprehension in dogs relies on a slower speech rhythm tracking (delta) than humans (theta), even though dogs are equally sensitive to human speech content and prosody. Thus, the dog audio-motor tuning differs from humans, who vocally adjust their speech rate to this shared temporal channel.