Ever wonder if your dog can understand the things you say to him?
You probably talk to him in baby talk because he seems to respond to that better, right? Who can resist anyway? Our dogs are like our babies, and we want them to know by the way we talk that we love and care about them.
A recent study shows that talking to your dog in baby talk may actually improve the way he understands you.
It can also make your dog more likely to pay attention and listen closely. According to the co-author of the study, Alex Benjamin, a Ph.D. candidate at the U.K.’s University of York:
“Dogs, we think, are very sensitive to changes in acoustic properties — things like the gender of the person, the size of the person — so that’s why the recording of the speech always matched the person that was holding the speaker.”
The study was pretty interesting in itself.
The researchers took 37 dogs and leashed them in a room with two people. They heard two types of recorded speech — a normal, conversational tone and “dog-directed speech,” a sort of equivalent of dog baby talk. Both recordings used words that the dogs could relate to, such as “treat.” The results were interesting.
Benjamin explained:
“The dogs spent more time looking toward the person using dog-directed speech. And they chose on average to spend more time with the person who had recently been producing this sort of speech register. This suggests that we are sensitive to the linguistic ability of the animal or person we are talking to. And it’s largely unconscious — people don’t realize they are doing anything different.”
So, why do people automatically know to talk to dogs this way?
It’s not really known. Dog talk is slightly different than baby talk and is based more on the way dogs hear and understand language. The way people talk to other animals is also different and corresponds to their own language abilities. For example, people who have parrots tend to talk to them in baby talk too, but it is different. Parrots can understand vowel sounds and even repeat them. Parrot owners tend to use longer and more exaggerated vowel sounds. Dogs aren’t going to speak the words back, so there is no need to exaggerate the vowels.
Dogs don’t necessarily care about the words or how they sound, but more so the tone of the words and how they relate to the things that interest them.
If the word “treat” is said with a certain tone and attitude, dogs associate it to an already positive thing and remember that word more easily. Negative words are said negatively, and dogs learn to relate to them, too.
Benjamin added:
“Perhaps dogs use the intonation to initially attend to the speech, and then recognize whether the words you are using are related to them or not.”
Juan Uriagereka, a linguist at the University of Maryland, College Park, also talked about the study.
He said:
“It would be interesting to test whether hormones like oxytocin, which facilitates contact in mammals of the same species, may be involved in the processing of ‘baby talk’ and ‘dog talk,’ respectively. We’re not trying to argue that you have to talk to your dog in baby talk for it to love you.”
So, what does this study mean?
It means that the next time you find yourself talking baby talk to your dog, you don’t have to be embarrassed about it. If anyone asks you why you are doing it or starts to poke fun about it, you can tell them that there is scientific proof that it’s necessary.
Maybe the reasons dogs and babies get along so well is the fact that dogs can understand babies so well.
Either way, the study offers some interesting insight into a dog’s mind and abilities.
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