Buzz
Hiiiiiiieeee! Who’s a little cutie? Yes, you are!
Does that sound familiar? Even if you haven’t spoken like this to anyone, you’ve likely heard someone else do it. But if you imagine who’s on the receiving end of this exchange, could it be a baby or a dog?
It could be both. Researchers have examined the way we talk to babies and pets, finding a surprising amount of similarity. Both infant-directed speech (also called motherese) and pet-directed speech share features like a rising intonation, a higher pitch, and slower pronunciation.
Why do people use these vocal features? For infant-directed speech, researchers think they might help promote language development by emphasizing key differences between sounds and grabbing the child’s attention. This instinct to speak this way to babies could be rooted in a biological drive for behaviors that aid language learning. However, not all cultures engage in this kind of speech, and even in cultures that don’t, babies still manage to learn language. Humans pick up language regardless of whether anyone speaks to them in a sing-song, high-pitched voice.
So, it’s possible that baby talk doesn’t actually assist babies in learning to talk. But once babies begin using words and forming sentences, caregivers tend to drop the exaggerated tone. It seems that our tendency to speak in a sing-song voice is less about teaching and more about the assumption that the listener isn’t yet familiar with our language.
This assumption also seems to explain why we speak to dogs in this way. We know they won’t learn to talk, but we instinctively use baby talk. And because dogs may understand various commands but never use words or sentences themselves, our baby talk habits continue.
A recent study by Tobey Ben-Aderet and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, revealed that people use high-pitched, dog-directed speech even while reading sentences to pictures of dogs. While the features were more exaggerated for images of puppies than adult dogs, this speech pattern was used for dogs of all ages. It wasn’t just a reaction to “babyness,” as such.
They then played the recorded sentences to dogs through speakers and observed their reactions. Puppies responded more strongly to dog-directed speech, but adult dogs showed no preference. This might be because adult dogs are more attuned to familiar people, and the speakers were unfamiliar. However, as the report suggests, "pet-directed speech exploits perceptual biases that exist in puppies but not adult dogs.” So, baby talk may have some functional purpose, but only for puppies.
However, usefulness isn’t everything. The authors conclude:
"This study suggests that dogs are often viewed as primarily non-verbal companions, prompting humans to adjust their speech in a way similar to how they speak to young infants. This communication strategy appears to be used in other scenarios where the speaker, consciously or unconsciously, believes the listener may have difficulty understanding language or speech, such as when conversing with elderly people or speaking to someone who isn't fluent in the language."
We don’t talk to dogs as if they were babies, nor just because they’re cute, but because we perceive them as having more difficulty understanding us. Dog-directed speech may indeed help them comprehend us, but even if it doesn’t, we’re likely to continue using it. Won’t we! Won’t we, baby! Yes, we will! We will! MWAH!
