Who’s a good boy?

New research shows an adult dog is more likely to want to interact and spend time with a speaker who uses dog-directed speech with dog-related content.

Scientists at the University of York conducted a series of speech tests with adult dogs, which listened to a person using dog-directed speech — a high-pitched voice with exaggerated emotion — containing dog-related content — phrases like “you’re a good dog” and “shall we go for a walk?”

Then another person spoke, using adult-directed speech, with no dog-related content, such as “I went to the cinema last night.”

Attention during the speech was measured, and following the speech, the dogs were allowed to choose to interact with a speaker.

Alex Benjamin, a Ph.D. student in the psychology department, said the adult dogs were more likely to want to interact and spend time with the speaker who used dog-directed speech with dog-related content.

He added, “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 emotional voice in order to find it relevant.”

Parallels with baby talk?

According to Dr. Katie Slocombe from the York department of psychology, “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.”

This form of speech shares some similarities with the way humans talk to their pet dogs, known as dog-directed speech.

“This high-pitched rhythmic speech is common in human interactions with dogs in Western cultures, but there isn’t a great deal known about whether it benefits a dog in the same way that it does a baby,” according to Slocombe.

She added, “We wanted to look at this question and see whether social bonding between animals and humans was influenced by the type and content of the communication.”

Previous studies on communicating with dogs had suggested that talking in a high-pitched voice with exaggerated emotion — just as adults do with babies — improved engagement with puppies but made little difference with adult dogs.

Research design

The research team positioned real humans in a room with a dog, unlike previous experiments where speech was broadcast over a loud speaker without a human present. 

The setup was intended to be more natural for the dogs and it helped the team test whether dogs paid more attention to “dog speak” and were motivated to spend more time with the person speaking to them.

First, dogs were exposed to a person using dog-directed speech containing dog-related content.

Next, they heard from another person who spoke in adult-directed speech, with no dog-related content.

The speakers then mixed dog-directed speech with non-dog-related words and adult-directed speech with dog-related words, to allow the researchers to understand whether it was the high-pitched emotional tone of the speech attracting dogs or the words.

The adult dogs clearly preferred interaction with humans using “dog speak” in both content and tone.

The research was published in the journal Animal Cognition.