Scientists from the University of York have shown that the way we talk to our canine friends is important in building pet-owner relationships, similar to the way 'baby talk' is in bonding a baby and an adult. . Speech interaction experiments between adult dogs and humans have shown that so-called "dog talk" improves attention and can help people bond socially with their pets. Previous studies on communication with dogs had suggested that talking in a high-pitched voice with exaggerated emotion, just as adults do with infants, had improved engagement in puppies, but made little difference to adult dogs. Researchers in York have tested this theory with new experiments designed to understand more about why people talk to dogs the way they do and whether it's beneficial to the dogs in some way, or if people do this because they want to treat dogs the same way. like babies.
Contrary to previous experiments, the research team placed real people in the same room as the dog, rather than transmitting speech through a loud speaker without a human present. This made the set up much more natural for the dogs and helped the team test whether dogs not only paid more attention to "dog talk" but were motivated to spend more time with the person who had spoken to them that way.
Researchers did a series of speech experiments on adult dogs, in which they were given the chance to listen to someone using canine-directed speech using phrases such as 'you're a good dog' and 'shall we go for a walk?' and then another person. which uses an adult-oriented speech with no dog-related content, such as "I went to the cinema last night." Attention during the speech was measured and after the speech the dogs were allowed to choose which speaker they wanted to physically associate with. The speakers then mixed the dog-directed speech with non-dog-related words and adult speech with dog-related words to show the researchers whether it was the high pitch of the speech that dogs were attracted to or the words themselves.
The researcher, said:“We found that adult dogs were more likely to interact and spend time with the speaker using dog-directed speech with dog-related content than those who did so with adult-directed speech without dog-related content.
“When we mixed up the two types of speech and content, the dogs showed no preference for one speaker over the other. This suggests that adult dogs need to hear dog-relevant words spoken in a high-pitched voice to find them relevant.”
