If you’re one of the may dog owners who speaks to your furry friends with that baby voice of yours, good news: A new study shows that talking to your dog using a softer, higher tone will improve communications between you and your furry friend, as reported by People Pets.
The study, which was conducted out of York, U.K. and published in the May 2018 issue of Animal Cognition, found that dogs pay better attention to humans when they use a “baby voice” tone in their speech toward them. What’s more, dogs also tend to connect more deeply with their owners on an emotional level when you bust out the baby talk.
Another surprise? Using language you’d often use to speak about your pup—words like “dog” and “walk”—helps to increase dog’s responsiveness within the conversation. According to researcher Dr. Alex Benjamin, phD, “the findings suggested that “adult dogs need to hear dog-relevant words spoken in a high-pitched emotional voice in order to find it relevant.”
However, there’s no word just quite yet on if whether using your baby voice with cats will make them listen any better. Which is a bummer, but at least we’re used to our feline fur babies not coming when we call their names, right?
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