High Pitch Puppies

Speaking in a high-pitched voice helps puppies understands you.

11:00 12 January 2017

Using exaggerated, high-pitched voice can help you easily capture the attention of your puppies than speaking in normal tones, a recent study has claimed.

 

In an experiment, 30 women where asked to look at pictures of puppies, adult dogs, and old dogs on a computer screen. They were then asked to say: ‘Hi! Hello cutie! Who’s a good boy? Come here! Good boy! Yes! Come here sweetie pie! What a good boy!’ as if they were speaking to a real dog.

 

Their responses were recorded and played to twenty different dogs – 10 adult dogs and 10 puppies.

 

The puppies responded to high-pitched voice by ‘reacting more quickly, looking more often at the loudspeaker and approaching it closer and for longer periods’, the researchers said.

 

 

For grown up dogs, there was no significant difference between reaction to dog or puppy-style speech.

 

Toby Ben Aderet of City University of New York, with colleagues from the universities of Lyon in France and Sussex, concluded that ‘pet-directed’ speech has ‘some value’ when speaking to puppies.