Does My Dog ''Speak'' Like Me? The Acoustic Correlation between Pet Dogs and Their Human Owners

TL;DR

This study explores the correlation between pet dogs' vocalizations and their human owners' language environment, revealing significant acoustic differences influenced by the owner's language and identifying features linked to language patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a new dataset of dog vocals with contextual data and demonstrates the influence of human language environment on dog vocalizations using classification and factor analysis.

Findings

Significant acoustic differences in dog vocals across language environments

Identification of acoustic features correlated with owner language patterns

Development of a new dataset with contextual and vocal data

Abstract

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.