Taking care of a pet is a special experience - every dog owner can attest to that. It is, therefore, important that every dog owner is able to translate every word they say or every action they make to their pets. Over two decades, research has already established that dogs have the ability to understand human communication in ways no other species can. Recent findings, however, provide new information confirming that there is a way to train a new puppy that will maximize his chances of communicating effectively with his owner.
Using Dog-Directed Speech
When you deliver a certain command to your dog, you may find yourself speaking slowly with a high pitch - this is what researchers call as the "dog-directed speech."
Dog-directed speech resembles the way you speak when you talk to infants. The manner of speaking aims to change the structure of sentences such as shortening and simplifying them. Often, dog-directed speech has the tendency to be delivered in a higher pitch- a sort of mechanism when we are not sure whether the words that we speak are understood.
A recent study confirms that talking with a higher pitch to puppies enables the animals to pay more attention to what is being said. Talking to puppies in a dog-directed speech allows for greater attention and reaction towards their human instructor than regular speech, as published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Using Human-Directed Control
Studies involved scientists asking 30 women to look at three images of dogs - a puppy, an adult, or an old dog. They were then asked to read the following sentences in a happy and dog-friendly way: "Hi! Hello, cutie! Who's a good boy? Come here! Good boy! Yes! Come here sweetie pie! What a good boy!"
The scientists recorded the participants while saying the same sentences. These were then played towards a person as a "human-directed" control.
The results proved that humans used dog-directed speech in all the pictures they saw. However, they change into higher pitches, on the average, for puppies. In short, the participants still use the dog-directed speech regardless if the dog was an adult or already old.
The experiment has then been carried out to 20 dogs in an animal shelter Manhattan. The researchers played the recordings from their first experiment in front of the dogs (using a speaker). The same cheerful messages have been played: "Hi! Hello, cutie! Who's a good boy? Come here! Good boy! Yes! Come here sweetie pie! What a good boy!"
The dog population, grown up which consisted of half puppies grown-ups, recognized the phrases played to them from participants using both "dog-directed" and "human-directed" speech.
The researchers carried out the same experiment in France. This is to avoid any human-disliking variable that the animal-shelter dogs in Manhattan may have. The phrases have been translated into French, and this time, used family pet chickens.
The Findings: Puppies Have Been The Most Responsive To Dog-Directed Speech
"[N]ine out of the 10 tested puppies responded more to puppy-directed speech than to human-directed speech, by reacting more quickly, looking more often at the loudspeaker and approaching it closer and for longer periods," researchers confirmed.
The scientists further observed that the older dogs didn't give as much response as the puppies. A Dog-directed speech didn't seem to elicit more effect than the human-directed speech.
Responses of the adult dogs have not been as significant as the puppies "with 11 out of 20 individuals responding more to the dog-directed speech and the nine others responding more to the human-directed speech," confirmed the researchers. It can, therefore, be concluded that using dog-directed speech to a puppy will yield the best response.
