Dogs show greater brain sensitivity to the speech directed at them than to adult-directed speech, especially if spoken by women, according to a new study in Communications Biology. The study shows that dog auditory brain regions responded more to dog- and infant-directed than to adult-directed speech, which is the first neural evidence that dog brains are tuned to the speech directed specifically at them.
Source: PHYS.ORG, August 22, 2023. Link. The study results suggest that the way we speak to our dogs does matter, and that their brain is specifically sensitive to the exaggerated prosody* typical to the female voice.
*Prosody is simply a fancy word for expressiveness in speech. It includes elements such as intonation, stress, tone, and rhythm.