Benjamin, Alex and Slocombe, Katie orcid.org/0000-0002-7310-1887 (2018) 'Who's a good boy?!' Dogs prefer naturalistic dog-directed speech. ANIMAL COGNITION. ISSN 1435-9448
Abstract
Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a special speech register thought to aid language acquisition and improve affiliation in human infants. Although IDS shares some of its properties with dog-directed speech (DDS), it is unclear whether the production of DDS is functional, or simply an overgeneralisation of IDS within Western cultures. One recent study found that, while puppies attended more to a script read with DDS compared with adult-directed speech (ADS), adult dogs displayed no preference. In contrast, using naturalistic speech and a more ecologically valid set-up, we found that adult dogs attended to and showed more affiliative behaviour towards a speaker of DDS than of ADS. To explore whether this preference for DDS was modulated by the dog-specific words typically used in DDS, the acoustic features (prosody) of DDS or a combination of the two, we conducted a second experiment. Here the stimuli from experiment 1 were produced with reversed prosody, meaning the prosody and content of ADS and DDS were mismatched. The results revealed no significant effect of speech type, or content, suggesting that it is maybe the combination of the acoustic properties and the dog-related content of DDS that modulates the preference shown for naturalistic DDS. Overall, the results of this study suggest that naturalistic DDS, comprising of both dog-directed prosody and dog-relevant content words, improves dogs' attention and may strengthen the affiliative bond between humans and their pets.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2018. |
Keywords: | Journal Article |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Sciences (York) > Psychology (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 13 Mar 2018 11:30 |
Last Modified: | 16 Oct 2024 14:32 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-018-1172-4 |
Status: | Published online |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1007/s10071-018-1172-4 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:128476 |
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