How dogs hear us: human voice perception by domestic dogs.

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For domestic dogs, understanding our signals is an important social ability. We often hear that dogs are highly skilled at responding to visual signals like pointing in comparison to other animals, yet we know very little about how they perceive our voices, despite the fact that we talk to them all the time. Many of us think that dogs understand us quite well, but what exactly do they hear when we speak to them? Can dogs interpret our tone of voice, recognise our words, or both? How do they learn their name, their owner's voice, or spoken commands? How can they pick this information out from our complex streams of speech? Do these learning abilities change over their lifetime, or depend on their social experiences with people? Are dogs naturally tuned into some aspects of our voices more than others, and can we use these biases to help them to learn to respond to us? Can this explain why we talk to dogs similarly to babies, rather than assuming that we only do so because companion dogs often seem to fall into a comparable role? There are so many questions that we do not have the answers for, yet these are important questions for social and training situations, where miscommunication can significantly reduce the quality of the interactions between people and dogs, and potentially lead to the compromised welfare of both participants. Our research seeks to address these questions by: a) documenting the development of human voice perception abilities in puppies, including direct comparisons with adult dogs to explore the influence of age and social experiences on these abilities; b) investigating whether some of the voice features that help human babies to learn object names can also influence learning in dogs, and if so, how; and c) determining how dogs cope with our often complex utterances in order to extract useful information. Our research team has the relevant strengths in the function and evolution of vocal communication and cognition in both animals and humans, as well as specific experience investigating dogs' perception of vocal cues. We propose to conduct a series of six multi-component empirical studies with puppies and adult dogs from different social backgrounds, that will address key research questions and test novel hypotheses in the key focus areas identified above.This research will yield new knowledge in an under-researched topic, and illuminate an important aspect of dogs' social interactions with humans that has rarely been considered, yet is potentially of great importance. Our project includes core events that will showcase these results to a wide range of practitioners involved in dog welfare, training and management, as well as the general public. There will also be activities to supplement the professional development opportunities for school staff.