Do you babble to your bichon, converse with your corgi or whisper to your whippet? If you do, you are not alone. Most of us talk to our dogs and, when we do, we often adopt the high-pitched sing-song voice that we use for babies.
This 鈥渂abyese鈥� engages the attention of human infants better than a normal speaking voice and, by exaggerating intonation, it helps them learn language. The question is why we use it on our pets.
Although there is a , most pooches get along fine understanding only a handful of our words and not one of them has ever learned to talk back. So why bother babbling at them?
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One possibility is that we just can鈥檛 help ourselves. Back in the 1940s, ethology pioneer Konrad Lorenz hypothesised that doe-eyed, button-nosed small animals press the same demand-for-care buttons as our own young. He called this . If this is the case, we should give up talking babyese to dogs as they grow up.
An alternative theory is that we use this exaggerated intonation believing that it makes our utterances clearer. People don鈥檛 just talk babyese to babies, but also to the elderly, and to foreigners who don鈥檛 understand our language. So maybe we use it on dogs (鈥溾�� anyone?) because we know they don鈥檛 understand us. If that鈥檚 the case, the age of the dog really shouldn鈥檛 make a difference.
Hello Cutie!
In a pair of clever experiments reported on today, researchers set out to find out not just why people talk to dogs like this, but also the impact that different ways of speaking has on dogs of different ages. First, volunteers were invited to read a script of classic human-dog dialogue (鈥淗ello Cutie! Who鈥檚 a good boy?鈥� and more of that ilk) to pictures of dogs of three ages: young, medium and old, as well as to a human control (who must have felt pretty weird).
Puppies did get offered slightly more intense babyese than adult dogs, but it was still there when . This supports the idea that it is knowing that dogs don鈥檛 understand us, rather than baby schema, that prompts us to talk to them like this.
But what did the dogs make of it all? The team played recordings of people reciting this script to dogs of different ages. Adult dogs responded with indifference no matter what the tone, but the puppies showed a much livelier response to infantile babbling 鈥� and, furthermore, the higher its pitch, the more the puppies lapped it up.
Why the difference? It鈥檚 hard to say, but it could be because dogs themselves use high-pitched vocalisations to direct attention, yet older dogs have simply learned that most of what a disembodied human voice says is best ignored.
In any event, fellow canine cognition researcher Erica Feuerbacher and I found that, for adult dogs, : petting trumps talk. We did not, however, test puppies, and this latest study suggests that if we had, our results might have been different.
Now try explaining that to your dog.
