More like wo-man’s best friend.

Dogs are more likely to listen to women than men for one surprising reason, a new study published in the journal Communications Biology found.

While conducting a series of brain scans on trained dogs, researchers based at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary found similarities between the brains of the poked-and-prodded pooches and the brain of a human infant while both were processing speech with exaggerated intonations — often referred to as baby talk.

Turns out, the sing-song voice — referred to exaggerated prosody by the study authors — employed when speaking to a small child with limited linguistic competence, typically in order to get their attention, works just as well on the family pet.

What’s more, the dogs’ brains responded more when the speakers were women, the report stated.

The study is the first of its kind to offer proof that dogs are actually sensitive to the manner in which people speak to them.

“Studying how dog brains process dog-directed speech is exciting, because it can help us understand how exaggerated prosody contributes to efficient speech processing in a nonhuman species skilled at relying on different speech cues (e.g. follow verbal commands),” Anna Gergely, co-first author of the study, explained in a explained in a published statement.

The silly-sounding speech directed at infants is known to be vital to the cognitive, social and language development for children — and Hungarian researchers wanted to know if this applied to furry friends, too.

Using an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), experts measured the brain activity of trained, conscious family dogs as they listened to speech directed at dogs, infants and adults recorded from 12 women and 12 men in real-life interactions.

The study revealed that auditory regions in dogs’ brains responded more to dog- and infant-directed speech than to normal, adult-directed speech — marking the first neural evidence that dog brains are more attuned to speech directed specifically at them.

“What makes this result particularly interesting is that in dogs, as opposed to infants, this sensitivity cannot be explained by either ancient responsiveness to conspecific signals or by intrauterine exposure to women’s voice,” Anna Gábor, co-first author of the study, said.

“Remarkably, the voice tone patterns characterizing women’s dog-directed speech are not typically used in dog-dog communication – our results may thus serve evidence for a neural preference that dogs developed during their domestication,” she continued.

“Dog brains’ increased sensitivity to dog-directed speech spoken by women specifically may be due to the fact that women more often speak to dogs with exaggerated prosody than men,” Gábor added.