Does My Dog ''Speak'' Like Me? The Acoustic Correlation between Pet Dogs and Their Human Owners
This addresses an underexplored problem in animal behavior and human-pet interaction, but it is preliminary and incremental in scope.
The paper investigates whether domestic dogs' vocalizations correlate with their owners' language environments, finding significant acoustic differences in dog vocals from two language settings and identifying potential correlations with host language patterns.
How hosts language influence their pets' vocalization is an interesting yet underexplored problem. This paper presents a preliminary investigation into the possible correlation between domestic dog vocal expressions and their human host's language environment. We first present a new dataset of Shiba Inu dog vocals from YouTube, which provides 7500 clean sound clips, including their contextual information of these vocals and their owner's speech clips with a carefully-designed data processing pipeline. The contextual information includes the scene category in which the vocal was recorded, the dog's location and activity. With a classification task and prominent factor analysis, we discover significant acoustic differences in the dog vocals from the two language environments. We further identify some acoustic features from dog vocalizations that are potentially correlated to their host language patterns.