Why Its OK to Talk to Your Dog

Talking to Your Pets Is a Sign of Intelligence, Study Finds

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Now point to one of the two cups while establishing eye contact with your dog. Your dog will follow your gesture to the cup you pointed to and explore the cup, expecting to find something underneath.

This is because your dog understands that your action is an attempt to communicate. That means living in close contact with humans for over 30, years has led dogs to evolve communication skills that are effectively equal to those of human children.

You're Not An Idiot For Speaking To Your Dog In A Baby Voice, Study Suggests

But there are significant differences in how dogs understand our communication and how children do. The theory is that dogs, unlike children, view human pointing as some kind of mild command , telling them where to go, rather than a way of transferring information. When you point for a child, on the other hand, they will think you are informing them about something.

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Sign up for a free Medical News Today account to customize your medical and health news experiences. If you have a dog, you're likely in the habit of asking them, "Who's a good boy?

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Pet owners do this instinctively because they feel just as attached to their pets as they may to their infant. But does this sort of "baby talk" do anything for the dog? Researchers Alex Benjamin and Katie Slocombe, at the University of York in the United Kingdom, set out to investigate if so-called dog-speak improves bonding between pets and humans, and specifically, whether it is useful for the dogs.

Slocombe explains the motivation behind the research, saying, "A special speech register, known as infant-directed speech, is thought to aid language acquisition and improve the way a human baby bonds with an adult. Their findings were published in the journal Animal Cognition.

For the study, the researchers designed two experiments in which humans interacted with dogs. In the first, the researchers tested adult-directed speech versus dog-directed speech. The latter was tailored for dogs both in terms of content that is, the dogs were told things such as "You're a good dog" and "Shall we go for a walk? By contrast, adult-directed speech contained sentences such as "I went to the cinema last night," which were spoken in a "normal" tone of voice.

The dogs' attention spans were measured during the two speech types, and after hearing them, the dogs were invited to choose which speaker they wanted to interact with. This first experiment revealed that the dogs strongly preferred humans who had addressed them using dog-directed speech.

8 Things You Didn't Know About How to Talk to Your Dog

However, there was the possibility that it was simply the emotional tone that appealed to the dogs and that the content didn't have anything to do with their preference. So, in the second experiment, "the content from experiment one was reproduced but with reversed prosody such that the dog-related content was spoken with the prosody of [adult-directed speech] and vice versa.

Benjamin — who is a Ph.

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What Do Our Pets Get Out of Our Speeches?

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