Speaking to your pet as if they’re a baby might make sense

Conclusion: dogs process human speech like babies. This is a complicated topic judging by the language used by the scientists who did the testing which is why I am thankful for the video. The research concerns dogs. This is because it is convenient to do animal research using the more cooperative dog compared to cats. I would argue and hope that the research applies equally (or at least to a large extent) to cats which is why the article is on PoC.

Dogs process human speech like babies

Dogs process human speech like babies. Screenshot from video.

THERE ARE MORE PAGES ON COMMUNICATING WITH CATS AT THE BASE OF THE PAGE

All of us have spoken to our cat and dog companions as children. It is probably fair to describe the human to cat or dog relationship as one of adult to child. Unwittingly, this is not entirely irrational as the researchers found that dogs have the same ability to distinguish words as babies.

They looked at how dogs process human speech. Can dogs distinguish individual words in a long sentence? Babies become aware of the way certain syllables frequently go together.

 
The Times journalist, Rhys Blakely, describes the process as follows (in my words). The child’s brain rationalises that the phrase ‘scary dragon’ is made up of two words. The first words sound like ‘scar’ and ‘y’ and the second ‘drag’ and ‘on’. The brain learns that the sounds ‘scar’ and ‘y’ go together to form one word. The same applies to the word dragon.

They say that babies are able to do this at 8-months-of-age although they don’t understand the words.

The researchers found that when dogs listened to recorded human speech their brain activity indicated that they processed the sounds like human babies.

“The complex computations and the specific brain regions that dogs and humans use to discover words are surprisingly similar – Dr Marianne Boros of Eotovos Lorand University in Budapest.

Her colleague said that dogs seemed to be subconsciously using “exactly the kind of complex statistics human infants use to extract words from continuous speech”.

Link to the study report.

SOME MORE ON COMMUNICATION:

Dogs and infants respond best to baby-talk from women
A recent study found that dogs respond better to women speaking in baby talk compared to talking in ordinary human ...
Language is the biggest barrier in the human-to-cat relationship not intelligence
I've been thinking about the fact that people relate to their domestic cat companion as a child and as a ...
Female cat's meow is like music
This is a brief discussion on the well-known domestic cat's meow and talkative cat breeds. You will see some websites ...
Me and Gabs talking about bimodal communication with cats
This is me talking about a French study on how to get cats to respond more quickly which might please ...
Do cats like being sung to?
Do cats like being sung to? The answer, as per the Infographic, is that it depends on a number of ...
Useful tag. Click to see the articles: Cat behavior

Note: sources for news articles are carefully selected but the news is often not independently verified.
Useful links
Anxiety - reduce it
FULL Maine Coon guide - lots of pages
Children and cats - important

Michael Broad

Hi, I'm a 74-year-old retired solicitor (attorney in the US). Before qualifying I worked in many jobs including professional photography. I love nature, cats and all animals. I am concerned about their welfare. If you want to read more click here.

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *