But it didn’t seem to have much of an impact on their understanding if the consonants in their name were wrong (Spot versus Spod). In other words, dogs preferred their own correctly pronounced name to a version with a mispronounced vowel (think Spot versus Spit).
“Dogs demonstrated a vowel bias rather than a consonant bias, preferring their own name over a vowel-mispronounced version of their name,” the researchers wrote, “but not in comparison to a consonant-mispronounced version.” And it’s pretty much the exact opposite of the way humans process language when trying to understand each other: Humans have a bias for consonants. They found that dogs tend to pay more attention to vowels than to consonants when they’re trying to suss out what humans are saying to them. That’s among the findings of a new study by researchers at the University of Maryland published last month in Animal Cognition.įor the study, the researchers recruited 44 dogs and played them prerecorded, deliberately mispronounced versions of their names-one version featuring the wrong vowels, the other featuring the wrong consonants-as well as correctly pronounced versions.
Consonants and vowels play different roles in speech perception: Humans rely more heavily on information gleaned from hearing consonants than on information gleaned from vowels when distinguishing between words.
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