Abstract
There is growing evidence that dog-directed and infant-directed speech have similar acoustic characteristics, like high overall pitch, wide pitch range, and attention-getting devices. However, it is still unclear whether dog- and infant-directed speech have gender or context-dependent acoustic features. In the present study, we collected comparable infant-, dog-, and adult directed speech samples (IDS, DDS, and ADS) in four different speech situations (Storytelling, Task solving, Teaching, and Fixed sentences situations); we obtained the samples from parents whose infants were younger than 30 months of age and also had pet dog at home. We found that ADS was different from IDS and DDS, independently of the speakers’ gender and the given situation. Higher overall pitch in DDS than in IDS during free situations was also found. Our results show that both parents hyperarticulate their vowels when talking to children but not when addressing dogs: this result is consistent with the goal of hyperspeech in language tutoring. Mothers, however, exaggerate their vowels for their infants under 18 months more than fathers do. Our findings suggest that IDS and DDS have context-dependent features and support the notion that people adapt their prosodic features to the acoustic preferences and emotional needs of their audience.
Highlights
People tend to talk differently to babies and to pet dogs than they do to adults and the acoustic and linguistic features of such infant directed speech (IDS) and dog directed speech (DDS) proved to be very similar e.g.1 When compared to adult-directed talk, both infant- and dog-directed speech register have higher overall pitch and pitch variation (F0 range), lower mean length of utterance, and higher repetitiveness[2,3,4,5]
Existing evidence suggests that women and men differ in the use of verbal communication toward their dogs: the utterances used by women resemble more closely infant-directed speech[14] and there are other gender-specific differences in acoustic features of DDS15
We found evidence that both infant- and dog-directed speech have situation and gender dependent acoustic features that may change as a function of the emotional and attentional need of the addressee, as well as their language competence
Summary
The comparative analysis of the three ‘Free speech’ situations showed similar patterns in mothers’ and fathers’ pitch characteristics. In all age groups, mothers’ and fathers’ speech had significantly lower pitch range in the ADS condition compared to the other two addressees (Supplementary Table S13), while there were no significant differences between the DDS and the IDS conditions ([DDS = IDS] > ADS). In contrast to what found in the ‘Free speech’ situations, in the oldest age group (25.5 ± 3.5 months), the mean F0 values of both mothers and fathers was similar when comparing speech to young children and to dogs ([DDS = IDS] > ADS). We found a differential effect of infants’ age on mothers’ and fathers’ hyperarticulation (Supplementary Table S20); mothers of 4.8 ± 1.75 and 16.5 ± 1.25 month-old infants used more articulated vowels than fathers, though there was no difference between male and female parents in the 25.5 ± 3.5 month-old age group (Fig. 6)
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