What Should a Dog’s Name Sound Like?

Perhaps the most important sound that a dog can learn is its name. Our domestic dogs live in a sea of spoken human language from which they must pick out the sounds that are relevant to them. Thus, if you happen to say to your spouse or housemate, “Come over here and sit down,” how is your pet dog able to know that you haven’t just issued three commands aimed at them, namely: “Come!”; “Sit!”; and “Down!”? The answer is that, if a dog has been correctly trained, they understand that sounds that are relevant to them are usually preceded by their name. Thus, the specific canine syntax that the dog is looking for is “Lassie come!”; “Lassie sit!”; or “Lassie down!”

Some new research from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary suggests that all dog names are not equal. Certain linguistic sounds seem to have the ability to capture canine attention better and allow them to pick out their name from the flow of language more easily.

The Flow of Human Speech

Human speech is a continuous stream. For example, say:

“doyouwantmetothrowtheball”

out loud. Notice that there are no gaps between the written words, but as you speak these sounds, your brain adds the breaks between the words and syllables. This is a process known as speech segmentation, which is used to identify the boundaries between words or phonemes in continuous spoken language. In normal written text, we help the process by using spaces to separate words more easily and clearly.

Similar to that written example, most often human spoken speech is a continuous audio signal without specific pauses between the words. You can see this from the speech spectrogram below (where the sound frequencies are on the vertical axis and time is measured on the horizontal axis). This particular recording represents a measure of the sounds produced by a person speaking the phrase “I owe you.” Notice that although we would hear this as three distinct words, there are no explicit physical markers or gaps in the actual audio signal. The psychological question is “Which aspects of the stream of sound allow us to pick out the specific words?”

Isolating the Words

An important clue comes from the fact that words are made up of two major types of speech sounds, namely vowels and consonants. These are treated differently by the brain. Despite the fact that vowels are louder and more noticeable, you can say that consonants generally form the skeleton of words. So, if we have an uninterrupted stream of speech sounds, it is easier to detect specific words when we concentrate our attention on consonants. This strategy, called the “consonant bias,” is what human brains have adopted, and this mechanism is apparent even in infancy.

Testing How Dogs Hear Human Language

A recent report by a team of researchers led by Boglárka Morvai (a biologist) and Kinga Tóth (a psychologist), with the cognitive neuroscientist Attila Andics as the corresponding author, attempted to determine if dogs have a similar consonant bias when listening to human speech sounds. This study used 20 adults and their companion dogs. The participants (both human and dog) separately listened to a stream of speech made up of nonsense words while they were connected to an EEG monitor that measured the activity of their brains.

The signal the participants were listening to was a continuous flow of contrived three-syllable sounds. There were no pauses to indicate where one meaningless “word” ended and the next began. Three types of language streams were used. In one, consonant patterns formed the repeating three-syllable words while the vowels changed; in another, the vowels repeated and the consonants changed, while in the third there was no repetitive pattern.

The researchers were looking for a phenomenon called “neural synchronization,” which occurs when brain activity takes on the rhythm that we detect in the sounds we hear. The more clearly we detect the cadence or tempo of the words, the more distinctly that pattern appears in the electrical brain response.

Do Dogs and Humans Segment Language in the Same Way?

The differences in responses to the speech signals were quite significant. In humans, the response to the consonant-patterned words was around 25 percent higher than to the vowel-based rhythm. Dogs showed a similar consonant bias, with their neural responses around 42 percent stronger for consonant-structured words compared to vowel-structured words.

An interesting additional finding was that human brains could also track words built from vowel patterns, but considerably less strongly than the consonant-based words. However, dog brains did not show a similar response to vowels. This was interpreted by the researchers as indicating that people may simply be better at detecting unexpected or atypical patterns of speech.

Implications for Picking a Dog’s Name

All of this brings us back to the matter of which sounds might be best for a dog’s name. It is important for the dog to be able to detect its name from whatever flow of speech sounds are going on around him. Taking the results of this new research at face value, it would seem to suggest that it would be more efficient and effective if you gave your dog a name with more consonant sounds in it than one with more vowels. Therefore, names like Ruby, Wendy, Merlin, or Barrett would appear to be preferable to names like Ava, Iris, Arlo, or Owen. At least such consonant-rich names would be easier for a dog to distinguish or detect when they are embedded in the ongoing stream of human speech. Of course, whether your dog actually responds to the commands that they hear associated with their name is not just a matter of whether they can hear and recognize what is said, but it is also a matter of how well you trained them.

Copyright SC Psychological Enterprises Ltd. May not be reprinted or reposted without permission.

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